Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) is a Berlin- and London-based artist whose practice traverses video game design, performance, animation, and archival activism. Grounded in the lived experiences of Black trans people, their work constructs immersive digital worlds that challenge the boundaries between player and subject, archive and memory, witness and participant. Through speculative storytelling and radical interactivity, Brathwaite-Shirley reimagines the politics of visibility, care, and resistance.

Central to their work is the creation of interactive narratives that confront audiences with the ethics of engagement. In SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE (2021), players are forced to navigate a lightgun shooter in which moral clarity is deliberately destabilized. “I want to activate people’s brains,” Brathwaite-Shirley has said, “and allow them to have conversations with people that they don’t like. With people that they don’t care about. With people that they think they have nothing in common with.” Their installations are never passive—each game demands complicity, empathy, and reckoning.

A formative moment in Brathwaite-Shirley’s trajectory came with the discovery of an 1836 poster of Mary Jones, a Black trans woman reduced to a cruel caricature and labeled the “Man Monster.” This erasure of Black trans histories catalysed the creation of Black Trans Archive (2020), a digital platform built through community collaboration, designed to preserve and honour the lives of Black trans people in the face of systemic neglect.

Recent projects have expanded the scope and scale of their work. THE SOUL STATION (2024), exhibited at Berlin’s Berghain, invited players into a post-revolutionary multiplayer world in YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING, where progress depended on collective strategy and trust. Across their practice, Brathwaite-Shirley consistently turns the screen into a site of encounter—forcing players to not only witness but to choose, fail, and try again.

Their work has been shown internationally, including at MoMA, Tate Modern, the Serpentine, and most recently in solo exhibitions at Fundació Joan Miró, Studio Voltaire, and LAS. Despite growing critical acclaim, Brathwaite-Shirley’s unapologetically trans and Black-centered narratives have also faced censorship, particularly in the U.S., where institutions have pulled or restricted access to their work.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice is both archive and insurgency—unfolding spaces where the stories of those too often left out of history are not only preserved, but made powerfully, unavoidably present.