Location: Emeryville, CA
Medium: Installation, performance, new media, video, conceptual art, social practice
Website: robinbirdd.com
Robin Birdd David (she/they) is a Filipino American multidisciplinary artist born in Oakland, raised in Vallejo, and based in Emeryville, California. She received a BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in 2014. Her practice encompasses installation, performance, new media, video, and conceptual art, with work examining the unrequited relationship between human bodies and the systems they inhabit — probing consumerism, intergenerational trauma, colonialism, gender, and cultural heritage, particularly Filipino and Japanese American experiences.
In 2015, Birdd co-founded Macro Waves, a Bay Area–based art collective and creative studio centered on social equity, new media, and design. As Creative Director, she guides a team of artists, designers, and technologists of color who prioritize QTBIPOC+ narratives and embrace collective care and healing justice through multimedia arts. The collective has received the 2025–2028 Ruth Arts Core Grant Award, the 2024 Artist Choice Award, and a 2022 California Arts Council Impact Project Grant.
Birdd’s work transforms everyday commodities — porcelain figurines, plush toys, vegetables, dollar-store objects — into vehicles for investigating identity, technology, and speculative possibility. Her practice deploys play, humor, make-believe, and science fiction to transport viewers beyond existing structures and toward alternative futures. She has exhibited at institutions including SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and has held residencies at Recology San Francisco, Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, and SOMArts Cultural Center.
Robin Birdd David works across installation, performance, augmented reality, video, experimental film, soft sculpture, projection mapping, and wearable art. Her practice is grounded in material investigation: found and consumer objects are recontextualized to reveal the emotional and political weight embedded in the everyday. Works such as Vegetable Wearables (2018–2019) and Basketball Buddha 3-Pointer (2024) — an augmented reality sculpture modeled after a porcelain Buddha and a plush basketball sourced at Recology — combine humor and formal experimentation with rigorous critique of labor, commodification, and diaspora.
Themes of cultural hybridity and colonial inheritance run throughout her work. The series “仕方が無い/Shikata Ga Nai” (2018) and The Feeling of Being Brown in White Institutional Spaces (2018) address structural racism and the psychic toll of navigating dominant cultural institutions. Her collaborative practice with Macro Waves extends this approach into community-scale interventions — interactive murals, site-specific installations, and participatory programming that center the experiences of communities of color in the Bay Area and beyond.
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