Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an interactive artist whose practice centres on archiving trans Black experience through video games and installations. Her work treats this archival project as radical survival infrastructure, creating immersive digital and physical spaces that document and preserve narratives often absent from institutional records. By combining gameplay mechanics with archival methodology, Brathwaite-Shirley develops interactive environments where visitors encounter and engage with trans Black histories and futures.

Her recent institutional recognition includes a solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire in 2024, the FACT Liverpool exhibition, and a forthcoming Serpentine North commission launching in Autumn 2025. These projects demonstrate sustained institutional support for her distinctive approach to interactive media and archival practice. Through these platforms, Brathwaite-Shirley continues to expand the possibilities of how games and installations can function as tools for historical documentation and cultural memory.

As a speaker, Brathwaite-Shirley offers audiences direct insight into how interactive media can serve marginalized communities and create counter-narratives to dominant historical records. Her work challenges conventional understandings of both archival practice and game design, positioning interactive art as a site where survival, memory, and resistance intersect. Hearing from an artist actively shaping this field provides audiences with grounded perspectives on the political and creative potential of digital storytelling.