Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b.1995, London) archives Black Trans experiences through animation, sound, performance, and video games. The Berlin and London-based artist’s work confronts the historical erasure and neglect of Black Trans lives, creating spaces and narratives that center their bodies, stories, and futures.

Trans & Conditions, her major multimedia commission for CIRCA, unfolds across digital, physical, and public platforms, the project confronts the systems that govern how trans lives are recognised, controlled, and remembered — offering space for both discomfort and solidarity.

At the heart of the commission is https://transandconditions.com, an interactive platform guiding the public through a series of reflective prompts — including “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY TO THE TRANS PEOPLE WHO ARE SCARED RIGHT NOW?” — culminating in the creation of a public letter. These letters are archived as collective expressions of care, witness, and shared voice.

Created in response to the UK Supreme Court’s recent redefinition of “woman” under the Equality Act, the work uses digital space to pose urgent questions: Who gets to speak? Who is remembered? And under what conditions are trans lives permitted to exist?

To accompany the commission, CIRCA presents a series of four limited-edition screen prints by Brathwaite-Shirley — each a powerful declaration of trans autonomy, urgency, and resistance. 20% of proceeds from each print will be donated to the Trans Legal Clinic, a community-led initiative providing vital legal support and advocacy for trans people in the UK.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin and London-based artist whose work preserves and celebrates the lives of Black trans people through animation, performance, video games, sound and drawing. Combining lived experience with speculative fiction, they create immersive worlds that challenge audiences to confront questions of memory, responsibility and belonging, asking who is remembered, who is forgotten and who gets to decide.

A leading voice within a new generation of artists working across digital and physical space, Brathwaite-Shirley has developed a distinctive visual language that transforms participation into a political act. Their works often place viewers within interactive environments where choices carry consequences, creating encounters that are at once playful, uncomfortable and deeply human. Through this approach, they have established one of the most urgent and innovative artistic practices working today.

In 2025, Brathwaite-Shirley collaborated with CIRCA on Trans & Conditions, a major multi-platform commission spanning public screens, digital participation and print. Created in response to growing pressures facing trans communities, the project invited audiences worldwide to contribute messages of solidarity while amplifying trans voices across public space. The commission reflected a wider commitment shared by both artist and platform: using art not simply to represent the world, but to actively reshape it.

Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Barbican, Fundació Joan Miró, Studio Voltaire, FACT Liverpool, LAS Art Foundation, Julia Stoschek Foundation and the Project Arts Centre. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, they continue to push the boundaries of contemporary art through works that blend technology, storytelling and collective action into new forms of cultural memory.