Leilah Babirye

Leilah Babirye (born 1985, Kampala, Uganda) is a Ugandan artist whose multidisciplinary sculptural practice explores identity, sexuality, human rights, and queer community. Working across ceramic, wood, metal, and found materials, Babirye examines LGBTQ+ experience and cultural belonging through carving, burning, welding, assemblage, and the transformation of discarded objects into portraits and totemic forms. Babirye studied Fine Art, Sculpture, and Art History at Makerere University in Kampala. Her work often engages portraiture, African masking traditions, exile, memory, and activism, using hand-built ceramics, hand-carved wood, vivid glazes, and salvaged urban debris to consider gender fluidity, resilience, and the violence of anti-LGBTQ+ repression in Uganda and across Africa. Her work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Stephen Friedman Gallery, and Gordon Robichaux. Babirye lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.