Alisha B. Wormsley

Alisha B. Wormsley is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, film, sculpture, and social practice. Their work is grounded in world-building as a strategy for survival—developing material, spatial, and narrative systems that imagine futures rooted in care, redistribution, and collective agency. Drawing from ritual, cosmology, and lived community knowledge, Wormsley creates environments that function as sites of gathering, reflection, and resource circulation, with a commitment to rematriation. 

Much of Wormsley’s practice engages craft traditions—such as weaving, quilting, glass, and assemblage—placing them in dialogue with moving image and large-scale public installations. These hybrid forms allow the work to move between the intimate and the monumental, foregrounding labor, touch, and time while addressing expansive social and ecological questions. Recurring themes include rest as resistance, ancestral knowledge, and the physical manifestation of emotional and collective survival.

Wormsley’s projects include Cosmologyscape (with Suzanne Kite), which integrates media, public space, and Afro-Futurist and Indigenous protocols to create invitations for rest and reimagination; There Are Black People in the Future, an ongoing project that functions as both artwork and mini-grant program; and Sibyls Shrine, a residency supporting Black artists who m/other. Their permanent public art includes a major installation in the International Arrivals Corridor at Pittsburgh International Airport.

Wormsley holds an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College, is a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a professor of  Art and Social Practice at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Website: www.alishabwormsley.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alishabwormsley