Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963. When she was 11 years old, her and her family immigrated to France where she graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Nice. Later, Amer continued her education in Boston and Paris. Even though she uses various media, such as sculpture and textiles, the artist is best known for her erotic paintings, the focus of which is the naked female body. Amer’s work explores the tensions inherent in the relationship between sexuality and the religious, as well as the political and social clichés of contemporary society. She is the first Arab artist to have held a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In 1999, she won the UNESCO prize of the Venice Biennial and was an artist in residence at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Detroit Institute of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem have collected her works. In 2008, the Brooklyn Museum of Art held a retrospective of Amer’s career.