ABOUT

LaNia Roberts, otherwise known as LaNia the Artist is a nationally recognized fine artist from Louisville, Kentucky, and a proud first-generation college graduate with a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University ('19). Her work has been collected by major institutions such as KADIST and 21c Museum Hotels. Rooted in memory, identity, and liberation, her paintings use vibrant color, collage, and layered storytelling to honor the sacred complexity of Black life. She has traveled and studied in over a dozen countries in Africa, Europe, and North America, letting the world shape her artistic lens.

Alongside her fine art career, LaNia is a writer, speaker, and singer who has cultivated a global audience of nearly half a million followers and over 60 million video views through her creative voice online—empowering a new generation to heal, create, and embody radical compassion. In 2024, she released her debut vocal album, Born on Sunday (The Sketch), a raw, faith-rooted project created entirely with her voice, and in 2025 she signed her first book deal with HarperCollins Zondervan.

Artist Statement:

I make paintings that show my people in their full, multidimensional complexity. Using acrylic paint and collage, I build layered portraits from photographs I take myself—shooting hundreds of images of my family, then cutting, cropping, and piecing them together to create a single body made of many truths. I don’t exaggerate features—I multiply them. Extra arms, extra eyes, extra mouths. Because that’s how it feels to live as a Black person carrying a whole world inside, although we are often flattened or made monolithic in Western art and media. My work is a statement to combat this lie and claim the truth of our identity without shame.

In my ongoing series centered around the everyday happenings in my great-grandmother’s kitchen, I capture my subjects—my family—in their natural rhythm. I use bright, non-naturalistic skin tones—cobalt, fuchsia, orange, violet—not just to challenge how we see Blackness, but to free it. These colors aren’t decorative. They’re declarations of our right to exist beyond stereotypes, beyond shame, beyond the limits of a single narrative.

This work is about liberation through layered perspectives—rooted in the South, in memory, and in a love for my people that runs deep. I’m building an archive that honors every sacred facet of who we are.