Taylor Ngiri Seaberg

Taylor Ngiri Seaberg is a queer, third generation Kenyan-American community organizer and multi-instrumentalist based in Minneapolis. For their Recomposing America project, ACF has commissioned a new cross-cultural album titled Black Lilies that features global artists across the African diaspora.

About the Commission

Born in Germany and living in the Azores, Portugal, Italy, and England before age 18, Ngiri’s work grapples with being third-cultured: living in liminal spaces and in between different countries and heritages as an American abroad. The album title is a reference to the “Lily-White Movement,” an anti-Black political movement within the Republican Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project critiques the meaning of “The American Dream” in a United States that is often violent and dangerous for Black people, and examines the global privilege of American citizenship in a world where immigrants cannot freely traverse borders.

---

About Taylor Ngiri Seaberg

Taylor Ngiri Seaberg (they/them) is a queer, third generation Kenyan-American community organizer and multi-instrumentalist (bass is their main love language) based in Minneapolis with artist communities in Mexico City and Chicago. Currently, they are a 2025-28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow releasing a Black Trans short horror film, a book on incarceration, and a self-produced beat-tape album under their artist moniker “Manic Pixie Dream Boi,” highlighting bi-polar disorder and de-stigmatizing mental health in the Black community. They were awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board (MSAB) 2019 Cultural Community Partnership grant for an artist networking series called “Artist Feast.” They have been awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) grant and Red Bull Arts grant for their protest photography around the uprising in the Twin Cities. The experimental, weird, and taboo are personal favorites of Ngiri’s music tastes.