Lilly Manycolors

Lilly Manycolors (Australian-American b.1989) is a mother, scholar, youth arts educator and interdisciplinary artist known for their emotionally excavating artworks and ritual performances. Manycolors utilizes their racialized, marginalized upbringing and as a disconnected/reconnecting person of Afro-Indigenous (West African + Choctaw descent) and Anglo-Australian heritage in their art practice to “move towards existential reconciliation and evolving beyond the human, restoring a sense of beingness, and reclaiming the self from the desires of white supremacy” through composting the ways in which one is commodified within colonialism.

As an interdisciplinary visual artist, they are mostly self-taught, and their artworks have been shown in Mexico City; Cincinnati, OH; Boston, MA; Providence, RI; and New York, NY. Their scholarly work centers trans-species kinships and decenters human supremacy seeking to understand the human’s role in a planetary future. Publications in journals and anthologies include topics of motherhood, land and animal agency and decolonial mapping practices.

Manycolors runs youth arts programs yearly for elementary, middle and high schoolers that are rooted in political liberation, planetary kinships and reframing art as a mechanism for growing, learning and sharing. They founded the community arts studio AUNTY’S HOUSE in 2023 to fulfill the need for a parent/youth-centered art space that bolsters multigenerational engagement.