Sarah Burney is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Raised in Kuwait and Pakistan, she specializes in contemporary printmaking and contemporary art from South Asia and its diasporas. Her work is grounded in close attention to artists’ materials, processes, and languages, and shaped by a longstanding interest in how artworks carry histories of migration, translation, collaboration, and place.

Burney’s curatorial practice has developed across museums, nonprofit art spaces, community printmaking studios, feminist art collectives, commercial galleries, and artists’ studios. Her projects often begin with the particularities of process: how an artist chooses a paper, cuts a block, builds an image, handles language, or transforms archival material into visual form. Across her writing and exhibitions, she seeks to expand the histories and geographies through which contemporary art is understood, with particular attention to artists working between South Asia and the United States.

Her recent and forthcoming curatorial projects include Krishna Reddy: Heaven in a Wildflower at Print Center New York; Zarina: Directions to My House at STPI, Singapore; Umber Majeed: Digital Handicrafts at 12Gates Arts; and Chitra Ganesh: Impressions of Mythic Futures at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, co-curated with Ben Levy. She has also curated The New Minimalists at Abrons Art Center and collaborated with Amethyst Rey Beaver on Adeel uz Zafar: Triad (2024) at Aicon Contemporary (New York) and Encounter/Exchange (2022) at Praise Shadows Gallery (Brookline, MA). In 2019, she received a Tulsa Artist Fellowship curatorial fellowship.

Burney’s writing has appeared in or been commissioned by Ishara Art Foundation, ArtAsiaPacific, Sotheby’s, Kajal Magazine, Tribe Photo Magazine, Scroll Projects, Aicon Contemporary, Union Pacific Gallery, Praise Shadows Gallery, and Alexis Bittar’s Journal, among others. Her recent essays include “Zarina’s Urdu World” for Ishara Art Foundation and “Zarina at Atelier 17: The Printshop as Passport” for the forthcoming publication Atelier 17 at 100 from Skira. From 2020 to 2024, Burney wrote a recurring column on Kajalmag.com titled One Piece by. Other recently published writing includes the exhibition essay Hangama Amiri: Reminiscences for Union Pacific Gallery (London), and Hareth Yousef: Fellaheen Castles, Views, and Dreams for Tribe Photo Magazine, Issue 13. In 2018, she partnered with Zarina to co-author Directions to My House, one of the artist’s last major publications, published by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Combining biography, oral history, poetry, and images, the book chronicles Zarina’s life and work in her own words.

From 2009 to 2013, Burney worked in Zarina’s studio, where she assisted with major exhibitions and publications, including Zarina: Paper Like Skin, organized by the Hammer Museum and later presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, the Indian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. This experience continues to shape her approach to artists’ materials, archives, language, and the intimate forms of knowledge that emerge through studio practice.

Burney has also held roles at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, where she managed printmaking classes, exhibitions, artist talks, fellowships, fairs, and fundraising initiatives, and at the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, where she served on the board from 2014 to 2016. At SAWCC, she helped secure funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and developed programs with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Abrons Art Center. Her broader professional experience includes work with the Guerrilla Girls, Bodhi Art, Gallery Espace, The Multiple Store, and other arts organizations and galleries.

Burney serves on the Board of Trustees of Print Center New York. She holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Wellesley College, where she focused on printmaking.