Born in Belfast in 1987, Amira McDonagh is a multidisciplinary visual artist who now lives and works on the southeast coast of Northern Ireland, near the picturesque Mourne Mountains.

Having graduated from Cardiff School of Art in 2011, Amira has always considered herself an oil painter first and foremost but makes drawings, prints and photographic images in addition to paintings.

Currently, Amira’s artistic practice centres around catharsis. Following the loss of her mother in 2022, Amira has been exploring aspects of her identity and background as a way of channelling her grief and emotion. Her practice intensely focuses on who she is;
her family heritage, remembered memories, and experienced trauma. Inspired by the Fauvism movement as well as her immediate surroundings and recurring memories, Amira confidently takes her viewer through abstract narratives, hoping to draw them into a quiet moment of reflection inside each work.

Using her practice as a cathartic release is a thread that Amira has been subconsciously building in her work since 2021 with the exhibition of her painting ‘Nightingale 2020’ at the 140th Royal Ulster Academy annual exhibition in the Ulster Museum, Belfast, and her commission from Power NI on behalf of the Northern Ireland Hospice to design and deliver the public sculpture ‘Written in the Stars’ Elmer