Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video installation, film, performance
Website: leilaweefur.com
Leila Weefur (he/they/she) is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator born and based in Oakland, California. Weefur earned a BFA in Film and Media Studies from California State University, Los Angeles, with additional studies at Howard University, before completing an MFA in Studio Art at Mills College in 2016. Their early exhibition career developed through Bay Area venues including Southern Exposure, SOMArts Gallery, and Betti Ono in Oakland, and they have received recognition through the Hung Liu Award, the Murphy & Cadogan Award, and a fellowship at the Kala Art Institute. In 2024, Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in Visual Arts and completed a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
Weefur has taught as a lecturer at Stanford University and is a founding member of The Black Aesthetic, an Oakland-based curatorial film collective dedicated to showcasing rare and influential films by Black filmmakers. Their writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Baest Journal, and Sming Sming Books, and they have served as Audio and Video Editor-in-Chief at Art Practical. Weefur currently holds a position as Assistant Professor of Photo/Media + New Genres at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Their work has been presented at and supported by institutions including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, the Walker Art Center, the McEvoy Foundation, Locust Projects (Miami), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn), The Kitchen (New York), and Minnesota Street Project. They have also received a Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund grant and the MSP California Black Voices Project grant.
Weefur’s practice centers on architectural video installation — large-scale, immersive works that transform gallery and institutional spaces into environments for contemplating Black, queer, and gender-variant experience. Their films often unfold through a dream logic, layering voiceover, original electronic scores, and carefully chosen archival and tactile references (lace, cotton, blackberry juice) to engage the senses and the body of the viewer as a participant. The spatial design of their installations — walls, glass partitions, multiple projection surfaces — forces viewers to choose a position and become implicated in what they witness.
Recurring concerns include sensorial memory, Black eco-geographies, hyper-surveillance, the erotic, and what Weefur calls “phenomenological Blackness.” Drawing on queer theory (particularly José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of collective becoming), Black religious traditions, and environmental ecology, their work deconstructs systems of belonging — religion, race, gender, and landscape — by making visible both the beauty and violence embedded within them. Collaboration is central to the practice: Weefur works frequently with electronic musicians KYN (Josh Casey and Yari Bundy) and vocalist Sandra Lawson-Ndu to produce immersive soundscapes integral to the viewing experience.
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