Ainslee Alem Robson

Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist, and current Sundance-NEH Fellow. Her interdisciplinary practice involves an amalgam of film, installation, archival material, VR, and emerging technologies in digital art. Robson re-orients emerging technologies to operate in service to, and from positions of decoloniality and Black consciousness. She creates counterimaginings and emancipatory narratives speaking to the liminal spaces between Africa and its diasporas. Juxtaposing both futuristic and analog media, Robson’s works present temporal manipulations that radiate fluidly, and actively refuse linear definition.

Her directorial debut, Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR, premiered at Tribeca in 2020, and her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by the New York Times, Vellum LA, Ars Electronica, MU, ZHdK, Forum des Images, and MoMA New York respectively. Most recently, Robson has been invited to the Curator’s Special Projects “Guests From the Future” at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko.