Amahra Spence Email and Phone Number

Amahra Spence is an artist, curator, convener, strategist, researcher, systems designer and spatial practitioner. Inspired by social sculpture, her practice commits to infrastructure building, spatialising dream work, resource redistribution and platforming radical imagination as tactics for safeguarding the resistance, joy and collective imagination of oppressed people.A frequent speaker and guest lecturer, Amahra presents, designs and teaches internationally.Since 2019, she has created and supported multiple mechanisms to directly shift over £5m of tangible resource to underinvested in communities and organisations.As Founding Director of MAIA (2013) and Organiser of The Black Land & Spatial Justice Project (2020), she leads teams engaging culture, land and the politics of space to build real-time strategies for Black liberation. This includes Land Black, a research and speculative design studio prototyping anti-carceral architectural and land-based strategies. Amahra also pioneered YARD (2020), turning a residential townhouse into a neighbourhood site of imagination, artist residency space and community hub. She is currently working to create ABUELOS, an artist-led hotel and cultural space, grown from the spirit of Grandad's house.She has consulted and collaborated with a wide range of organisations, incl Balfour Beatty VINCI, Supporting Act Foundation, Contains Art, BBC, Birmingham Museums Trust, ARUP, Gensler, The National Lottery Community Fund and many more. As an artist, her practice has been supported by Punch Records, Arts Council England, Birmingham REP, Belgrade, Black Country Touring, Theatre Absolute, Talawa, Prada, British Council, Molior and others.Amahra has also published writing on the politics of the British land system, Afroecology, abolition, hip hop and architecture, legacies of community infrastructure building, the future of hospitality, speculative urban planning, alternative arts education and life-affirming economics.