"Art is a bridge to understanding; it flows through the veins of our stories"
- Naett Mbaye
Naëtt Mbaye is a French-Senegalese visual artist based in Dakar. Trained in art history, modern literature, communication, and fashion and textile design, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice at the intersection of photography, installation, video, and textile-based imagery. Alongside her visual arts practice, she also works as an actress, screenwriter and filmmaker, fostering an ongoing dialogue between cinema and the visual arts.
Whether expressed through photography, installation, video or cinema, her work is driven by a single ambition: to construct narratives in which memory, representation and lived experience intersect.
Born to a French-Ivorian mother and a Senegalese father, her practice is shaped by reflections on memory, transmission, identity and cultural representation. Describing herself as a "Black feminist artist and storyteller", she is particularly interested in marginalized narratives and the female figures that contribute to shaping our collective imaginaries.
Her work was notably featured in the Lagos Photo Festival Portfolio Review in 2023, and in several projects dedicated to the figure of the Drianké, including a group show at Galerie Le Manège of the Institut Français du Sénégal.
In 2025, she continued this research through Diggante Taar ak Kiliftéef (Poetry of a Social Fabric: The Drianké), an exhibition bringing together photography, installation, textile and video, works centred on this iconic figure of Senegalese femininity. The project also gave rise to an architectural walk through the streets of Dakar, developed in collaboration with architect Carole Diop, artist Audrey Derneville and OH Galerie.
Combining documentary research, personal narratives and formal experimentation, Naëtt Mbaye develops a sensitive body of work in which intimate memory, collective heritage and new forms of representation remain in a constant dialogue.