Hi, I’m Ainslee.
I grew up sipping mango juice at the bar of Empress Taytu.

nibbling on injera with salt.
no onions, no tomato, plain lamb tibs, extra dry and crunchy.
berbere on the side.

My family’s Ethiopian restaurant, was the first in Northeast Ohio.
Our tiny diaspora of Ethiopians and Eritreans introduced much more than injera
and coffee ceremonies to hungry Clevelanders in 1992.

We became unwitting ambassadors and translators of our culture
to everyone who stepped through our doors.

This experience of perpetual translation,
of daily gathering,
of embodied knowledge transfer,
and trust, that just enough order
would syncopate the chaos of the kitchen,
helped me birth muscles of empowerment.

It nourished my strength to eventually
learn to refuse certain translations.

Our walls sang lullabies of resistance
to colonial narratives in my textbooks.

Taytu’s kitchen may have since closed,
but it formed and protected the core of who I am,
and the questions I ask today
about empire, archives, ownership and legacy
in all corners of the world.

spaces like ours are often hidden in plain sight
all around the world.
I am on a mission to find them, hear their stories, step into, learn from, and revel within
the magic of their worlds, their many eras and contexts.
I am inspired by their origins, their characters, their songs, their afterlives.

for me these spaces represent a horizon of counterimaginings,
horizons on which we were “allowed” / free to exist
entanglements of romanticization
and the frontier of a diasporic imaginary.

these spaces are a network of information about our experiences in diaspora
they are/were living archives
a cartography on the scale of the planetary,
a framework.

I fear other Taytu’s may soon close, and be
sold, forgotten, gentrified,
erased,
With only fading memories of elders
to remind us of their meaning.

If they could speak, what would their jebena(s) say?

~proud child of Taytu

Traditional BIO

Ainslee Alem Robson is an Ethiopian-American writer-director and media artist who crafts emancipatory narratives and counterimaginings harnessing film, game engine technology, food, memory and archives as her ingredients. Refusing temporal linearity, Ainslee’s work speaks to the liminal spaces between Africa and its diasporas. Scrutinizing sites of erasure within hegemonic discourse, she aims to deconstruct hierarchies and colonial legacies while re-orienting emerging technologies to operate in service to, and from positions of Black consciousness. Juxtaposing both emerging and analog media, she stories that center agency,resistance and spice.

Ainslee has exhibited her film installation “Ferenj” in the “Guests From the Future” category at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko. Amongst other art spaces her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by MoMA, the New York Times, Ars Electronica, MU, and Vellum LA. Her debut non-fiction work “Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR” (2020) premiered at Tribeca, SXSW, and was showcased at film festivals internationally. She has guest lectured and led workshops at universities around the world including UCLA, the GSA in Johannesburg, MIT, Cornell, UCSD, NYU, and ZhDK. Her non-fiction writing has been published by eFlux and Guggenheim, Art Africa, Vogue Italia, and OffRamp academic journal. She holds a BA in Philosophy and French from The College of Wooster and an MA in Fiction & Entertainment from SCI-Arc.

She studied directing and screenwriting at the Sankofa Film Institute under Haile Gerima in the 2025 “Around the Fire” intensive. Grounded in this decolonial approach to filmmaking, she is currently developing her first feature documentary, Empress Taytu, alongside the film installation Yeskèn.

Fellowships and Residencies

BAVC MediaMaker Connect Residency 2026
Kala Institute of the Arts Fellowship 2026
Archival Research Residency at The Recovery Plan in partnership with Villa Romana Florenz and Murate Art District, Florence, Italy 2026
Motion Capture Residency, Studio 44 MOCAPLAB, Geneva, Switzerland 2026

Savvy Contemporary, Standing in the Cracks of Multiple Histories, Residency 2025
“Around The Fire” Writing/Directing Lab with Haile Gerima, Sankofa Film Institute 2025 Cohort

Headlands Center For the Arts, Kitchen Internship 2025
Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellowship 2022-23
Sundance Interdisciplinary ‘Art of Practice’ Fellowship 2021-22
Black Public Media PLUS Fellowship 2023
Studio Gilles Jobin Geneva MOCAP Residency
Goldsmiths MOCAP Streamer Virtual Artist in Residence 2022
Electric South ‘New Dimensions’ Lab 2022

Awards

IDA Pare Lorentz Fund 2024 Grantee
Black Public Media PitchBLACK 2023 Grantee

New York Press Club fo Special Event Reporting, national category, 2023
Finalist, Deadline Club awards, Multimedia, Interactive Graphics and Animation category, 2023

Cultured Focus Innovation in Film Award, Venice, Italy 2022
Special Jury Prize ex aequo, NewImages Festival, Paris, France 2020