Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Film, Textiles, Curation
Website: asariaibangbee.com
Asari Aibangbee (born 1998) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice spans short film, fiber art, and community archive. A first-generation American whose parents are Nigerian migrants, Aibangbee grew up in Los Angeles and Corona, California, before establishing a presence in the Bay Area. During their undergraduate years in San Francisco, they founded To Be Black and Queer, an art collective that created exhibition and programming spaces for Black Queer artists across the region, serving as its founder, art curator, and logistics coordinator. Aibangbee is currently a resident artist at Real Time & Space in Oakland.
Aibangbee has received the A24 x Made in Her Image Beyond the Screen Fellowship and the Crafting the Future Fellowship, which brought them to the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina on a Horn Scholarship (2023). They have participated in the Critical Juncture program at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, Promise Workshops at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, and She Made Workshops. Their fiber works have been shown at the BUTTER Fine Art Fair (2024) and the Spring 2025 Affordable Art Fair in New York City through SHEER gallery.
Aibangbee works at the intersection of film, fiber art, and community archive, with a practice rooted in world-building and the preservation of Black Queer narratives across the African diaspora. In their filmmaking, they direct and co-write experimental and Afrofuturistic short works that probe colorism, gender identity, body dysmorphia, and the systemic forces shaping Black mental health—often deploying speculative frameworks to examine real-world conditions of harm.
Their fiber art practice, which gained momentum during a 2023 residency, uses hand tufting, punch needle, and cyanotype techniques with sustainable materials including acrylic, cotton, mohair, silk, and wool. The resulting pieces are densely colored and textured, drawing on symbols, cultural artifacts, and motifs significant to the Black Queer community as metaphors for identity and belonging. A third pillar of Aibangbee’s work is community archive: the ongoing gathering and circulation of the stories and presences of Black Queer people across the diaspora.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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