Amanda Thackray is a multidisciplinary ecofeminist artist and educator, based in Newark, NJ, whose practice sits at the intersection of craft, sculpture, and environmentally-based social practice. Thackray’s projects have been exhibited at The Newark Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The Montclair Art Museum, The NARS Foundation, and The Knockdown Center, among numerous other galleries and museums.

During the summer of 2022 she is engaged in two local large-scale public art projects. Through the 2022 Coastal Climate Risk Communications Art Program, she and a collaborator will create two murals inspired by the watery patterns of suminagashi paper marbling, to inform Newark residents about coastal flooding hazards and climate resilience. Concurrently, she and a different collaborating artist are producing Riverbound, a community papermaking project on the bank of the Lower Passaic River, funded in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation through the Newark Artist Accelerator grant.

Thackray is the recipient of a Newark Creative Catalyst Fund Artist Fellowship in 2020 and 2021, a Puffin Foundation Grant for Environmental Art in 2021, and a NJ State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 2022. She has been awarded numerous residencies including The Arctic Circle in Svalbard, Norway, a year-long Scholarship for Advanced Study in Book Arts at The Center for Book Arts in NYC, and artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. Her work is in over a dozen public collections including The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Mediatheque Andre Malraux, France, Yale University, and The Library of Congress. She teaches printmaking, artist’s books, and papermaking at SUNY Purchase and Rutgers University. Thackray earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She is currently building a boat.