Nasrah Omar

About

𓏲｡𖦹°‧ Nasrah Omar is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, installation, XR, and collage. Through imaginative world-building, her work reconfigures narratives of visibility, connection, and regeneration; cultivating paracosms of healing. Interweaving threads from the South Asian diaspora, ecology, ritual, folklore, material culture, and technology, she constructs layered visual landscapes that explore pathways to de-colonial futurities, moving through the sensory, simulated, and sublime. Her practice is deeply rooted in the metaphysical and psychic dimensions of space, memory, and migration. 

She holds a BFA in Photography (with Honors) from School of Visual Arts and an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, supported by the Deputy Vice Chancellor’s International Scholarship and Rose Finn-Kelcey Bursary.

Nasrah’s work has been exhibited in group shows at Pioneer Works (New York), The Photographers Gallery’s small file photo festival (London), PhotoBook Cafe (London), TV Centre (London), Ph Museum’s Folio (Bologna), Swords Into Plowshares Gallery (Michigan), Baxter St CCNY (New York), La MaMa Galleria (New York) among others. Her work has been published in Aperture, Der Greif, Booooooom, Portrait of Humanity Vol. 5 (Hoxton Mini Press), ICP’s Global Images for a Global Crisis. Nasrah’s editorial commissions include Galerie Magazine, Mushroom People, Gaze Magazine and Polyester Zine. She is a recipient of the Image Equity Fellowship from Google, the Culture Push Fellowship for a Utopian Practice, the New York Foundation for Arts New Work Grant, and the SUGi x Nava Contemporary’s New Nature Award. Her writing (Reclaiming Colonized Frontiers) has been published in Azeema Magazine. 

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Nasrah’s multidisciplinary project 🌀Trace (In Continuum) is a labyrinthine exploration of ancestral memory through an unearthing of histories of resistance, recipes for healing, site-specific installations, rituals and cultivating spaces of/for care. The project becomes an offering to cultural and spiritual memory by honoring remembrance through processes of invocation, excavation, and reimagining. Rooted in a lived experience of third-culture existence and an itinerant sense of belonging, the work engages with diasporic South Asian histories while extending outward to encompass cross-cultural geographies of migration, networks of international solidarity, and practices of unlearning and collective healing. The landscapes traced are haunted, but not silent; both the digital realm and very embodied rituals provide concoctions for healing.

Technology operates as the medium: a way to make contact with ancestral revenants through digital channels. AI chatbots and text message exchanges are reimagined as oracular tools, haunted interfaces that allow spectral voices containing many multitudes to emerge. These digital dialogues and AR interventions along with medicinal plant recipes from Ayurveda and beyond resurface and recenter de-colonial knowledge systems. The space is reworlded with a nod to the visual language of real-time rendered video game. In it, nature fractures through rendered grids of containment; digital architectures are overrun by flora, fungal networks, and unruly organic forms. This entanglement between the synthetic and the elemental reflects the project’s broader vision, to disrupt colonial schematics of space, time, and memory, and to allow new, mycelial pathways of remembrance and repair to take root. An integral offering within Trace is a grief-tending and dreaming mandala: a participatory digital and IRL portal, creating space for a temporary commons, inviting participants to name what they are grieving and dreaming of: for turning speculative futures into reality, for the earth, for collective liberation.

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Forthcoming projects: With an invitation from For Freedoms, Nasrah was selected to join the inaugural cohort of Pollinator starting October 2025, a program organized around mutual support, shared learning, and momentum-building, connecting artists and cultural workers across disciplines to collaborate and build transformative ecosystems of care.

As part of Authority Collective, a vibrant network of BIPOC storytellers working with lens-based media and AR/VR, pushing beyond tokenism and dismantling systemic barriers with creativity and collective power, Nasrah will be participating in a pop up group exhibition at San Francisco Camera Work (August 30 – September 13, 2025).