“(King’s music) has elements of a guiding spiritual that floats in the air to give congregants the strength and, yes, the spirit to move forward.”
Leah King is a multimedia artist working in collage, sound, film, and performance. She creates intricately layered visual art works and multisensory installations that explore race, gender, power, and queerness through a futurist lens. Her most recent works center photos and sonic relics found in her family archive to produce multimedia collages and soundscapes that feature historical references, religious songs, vocal harmonies, and original electronic music to explore abstracted methods of ancestral storytelling.
King’s work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, Berlin Music Board, Museum of the African Diaspora, Headlands Center for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Los Angeles Center for Photography. Her work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Root Division Gallery, Barrett Art Gallery, Sovern Gallery, and the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum where she was an inaugural artist-in-residence. She was a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Political Power Fellow, Converse Rubber Tracks Berlin Artist Resident, and has presented her work at San Francisco State University, New York University, and California College of the Arts. In January 2025, she presented her research at the Dancecult Conference at Technische Universität Berlin, funded by a Center for Cultural Innovation Grant.
King received her MFA from USC Roski School of Art and Design where she completed a masters thesis on the healing modalities of house music and Black futurity, and a BA from Barnard College/Columbia University where she studied Black diasporic music and dance.