Sara Raza is an award winning art curator and writer specializing in global art and visual cultures from the contemporary Silk Road (Central and Western Asia). She lives and works in New York City where she founded the curatorial studio Punk Orientalism and is the Red Burns Fellow at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Masters Program and the program director for the first MA in Museum Studies in Central Asia a joint initiative of the Art and Culture Development Foundation and the Silk Road International University, in Samarkand Uzbekistan.

She was most recently the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for the Middle East and North Africa, where she built the collection and organized the exhibition But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2016), which travelled to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan (2018). Raza has curated exhibitions and projects for international museums, biennials and festivals including the Rubin Museum of Art, New York,  Mathaf: Modern Arab Art Museum, Doha, Qatar; the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, Canada; Maraya Art Center, Sharjah, the Tashkent Biennale, Uzbekistan; Rhizoma (Generation in Waiting) (collateral exhibition) 55th Venice Biennale; and the 3rd Baku Public Art Festival, Azerbaijan, among others. Formerly, she was the Head of Education and Public Programs at YARAT, Baku, Azerbaijan; Founding Curator at Alaan Art Space, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Curator of Public Programs at Tate Modern, London. Raza has written for numerous artist monographs, books, catalogues and publications, and is the West and Central Asia Desk Editor for ArtAsiaPacific Magazine.

She is the recipient of the 11th ArtTable New Leadership Award for Women in the Arts (2016) and was honored by Deutsche Bank and Apollo as one of 40 under 40 global art specialists (thinkers’ category) (2017), Walter Hopps Curatorial Excellence Award Finalist (2015) and the Arts Council of England Emerging Curator’s Awardee (2004-2005) among others. Sara holds a BA (hons) in English Literature and History of Art and a MA in 20th Century Art History and Theory both from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and pursued studies towards her PhD at the Royal College of Art, London.