Zainab Aliyu

Zainab Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses sculpture, video, installation, virtual environments, publications and social practice to examine how sociotechnical systems of control operate over time. She draws on her own body and family history as an archive. She was a resident at The Luminary in St. Louis as part of its 2024 cohort and at Pioneer Works in its Winter-Spring 2025 visual arts residency. In 2025 she was a BAXTER ST resident, and her solo show A litany for past suns ran at the Camera Club of New York in early 2026. She edited Shaper of God, a book on science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler published alongside American Artist's exhibition, and co-directs the School for Poetic Computation.