Mosa McNeilly sees her work as part of a canon of Black women artists, scholars, activists, and spiritual practitioners concerned with social justice, cultural reclamation, and freedom. An interdisciplinary artist working in Ontario for 35 years, her studio practice began in the 1980s with her studies at OCADU (then OCA). In the Indigenous Liberation series, 1988—lithographs, figurative, black and white— she confronted global themes of white supremacy and colonial violence. Her Black Complex series, 1989—monoprints, brown, red and black—incorporated collage and frottage techniques, unpacking the complexities of Black diasporic life.

TÜCH BĀS, 1993-95, was a pivotal body of work that launched her assemblage and found object practices. This series of large scale, full colour assemblages on canvas portrayED the exalted Black female subject; the Black woman, deified. As in Spiral and Bowls—1994, found object installations—and Towers—1995, light sculptures—representations of the four elements show up in her work again and again.

Remembering Lukasa, 2002—an assemblage and an experiment in mnemonics—marked the beginning of her Underground Railroad quilt codes research. In her Quilt Codes body of work, 2002-12, and Icons, 2013-14, she integrated encaustic mixed media into her assemblages, and delved into themes of memory and Egyptian and Yoruba cosmologies.

Since 2012, encaustic mixed media has become integral to her assemblages, and she has incorporated video and sound into her installations. Beginning with her graduate research in 2013, she has developed an extensive body of work confronting Middle Passage memory. In Bones, 2022, installation, and Sea Bath, 2024, performance, she centres the Black female subject, bringing encaustic, assemblage and installation into conversation with clown, movement, and voice. Employing hybrid Yoruba, Adinkra, and Vodou iconographies, she reimagines the poetics of memorialization.

Grounded in the reparative labour of gathering and assembling, Mosa McNeilly’s work contemplates fragmentation and gestures toward wholeness. Reflective of a creative practice that merges with ceremonial practice, her work brings about an integration of the material with the ethereal.

Mosa McNeilly’s work has been shown in galleries such as A Space Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, Metro Convention Centre, Studio Visuals, and Crossroads Gallery in Toronto, Articule Artist-Run Centre in Montreal, Pier 21 and Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax, Houseworks Gallery in Ottawa, Grey Roots Museum & Archives in Owensound, XChange Gallery and Studios in Victoria, Libby Leshgold Gallery in Vancouver, and Marryshow House in Grenada, as well as venues in Winnipeg, Sacramento, and Pyongyang. Her work has been featured in publications such as Cosmic Underground Northside: An Incantation of Black Canadian Speculative Discourse & Innerstandings (Cedar Grove Publishing, forthcoming), Canadian Women Studies Journal, Revue Noire, American Psychologist, Parallelogramme, and Borderlines.

She has performed in venues such as the George Ignatieff Theatre, Music Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum, Roy Thompson Hall, the Skydome, and Ontario Place in Toronto, the River Run Centre in Guelph, Dalhousie University in Halifax, and Lloyd Best Institute in Trinidad.

She was the manuscript editor on the OAAG award-winning AGO publication, Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, and on the AGO publication Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood, as well as on author Dr. Nikki Greene’s forthcoming book Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art, Duke University Press.

She has made lecture presentations at institutions such as York University, University of Waterloo, University of Ottawa, OCADU, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Ontario Black History Society, and Axené07 Gallery.

In her arts education practice, she has developed a pedagogy which endeavours to foster African cultural literacy, foster Black agency, and nurture Black self-love. Working independently and with arts organizations such as Inner City Angels, Coco Collective, Por Amor, and La Muse Art Studio, she has delivered hundreds of African cultural arts education projects and performances reaching thousands of elementary, secondary and post-secondary learners across southern Ontario.

And in her sacred leadership work, she works collectively to envision Black futures of possibility, and to curate spaces for Black healing. Partnering with community organizations such as Sacred Women International, Global Leadership Village, and Woodgreen Community Services, she serves women, youth, and children of African descent through art, performance, and spiritual practices grounded in knowledges of the African diaspora.

Mosa has received numerous arts and academic grants, awards, and scholarships, and is a graduate of OCADU and the School of the Toronto Dance Theatre, with studies at the Parsons School of Design and the Royal Conservatory of Music. she has received teachings from African and Indigenous Elders from the Yoruba, Dagara, Shona, and Anishinaabe spiritual traditions, and is an initiated Sacred Leader. She holds a MES from York University, with her thesis featured in the FES Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Series.