From Insecure to Rap Sh!t , Amy Aniobi is rooting for — and lifting up — Black creatives
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"It all started during the pandemic," Amy Aniobi says of her talent incubator, TRIBE, "and this churning feeling that I had of how do I continue to build that bridge?"
Aniobi has benefited from many a bridge in her career, even if they were ones she had to build herself — and like any good leader, she wants to make the path easier for those that come after her.
Joshua Kissi
Originally from Texas, but the scion of Nigerian parents, Aniobi ditched the Lone Star State for the eternal sunshine of California and the hallowed halls of Stanford. There, she was casual acquaintances with Issa Rae, but it wasn't until Aniobi was in grad school when she and Rae started working together on Awkward Black Girl, the webseries that would become Insecure.
The Awkward Black Girl writers' room met on Wednesday nights in Aniobi's West Hollywood apartment, eventually churning out two seasons.
"By day I was an assistant and then by night I was a staffed TV writer on a webseries. It was a really beautiful time," Aniobi, 38, says of the show, which premiered in February 2011. "And I told [Issa] when that ended, I was like, 'You say the word, wherever you go next, I want to go.' Because there was something so perfectly beautiful about feeling seen, knowing that my comedy fit her style, that we're both black women. I'm like, 'This black woman thinks I'm funny.' And all day long, no shade to the white writers I worked with, but I felt very out of place."
Glen Wilson/HBO
Aniobi continued to cut her writerly teeth on shows like Silicon Valley, 2 Dope Queens, and Trial & Error, but she began to question her own comedic instincts. The experience of working on Awkward Black Girl and being in a space with "someone who looked like me, who fully saw me," was one she'd been chasing for years — finally and fully realized when she landed in the Insecure writers' room in 2016. Aniobi worked her way up from a producer on season 1 (earning an Emmy nomination in 2020 for Outstanding Comedy Series) to writing the hilarious and critically-lauded premiere episode of the fifth and final season, as well as directing its seventh episode.
Aniobi learned a lot from Rae and her time at Insecure, such as the importance of "networking across" — "All of my best opportunities have come from the people sitting next to me" — and "to do what you want to do before you feel ready to do it because by the time you're ready, someone else will have already done it." Aniobi would take that adage particularly to heart in her next endeavors.
After Insecure ended, Aniobi went on to the Rae-created Rap Sh!t, a raucous comedy series that premiered in July, about a female rap duo based loosely on the rise of Miami group City Girls. But before all that, the pandemic hit. Writers' rooms turned to Zoom rooms and suddenly everyone was sheltering in place. Aniobi was one-off mentoring writers and they all seemed to have the same concern: "I don't know how to network. I don't know how to find people. I don't know how to build community through Zoom."
Raymond Liu/HBO Natasha Rothwell, Yvonne Orji, Issa Rae, Amanda Seales, and Wade Allain-Marcus on 'Insecure'
And that's how TRIBE came about. Aniobi founded the talent incubator as not only a year-long writers' mentorship program but also an ongoing career network for intermediate writers focusing on bridging the gap between writing independently and writing as a career in January 2021. At the time, she was also going into production of season 5 of Insecure and getting ready to direct her "very first episode of television ever" in the middle of a pandemic.
"So bitch was crazy," Aniobi notes, "but I was like, I don't know how to operate another way. I feel like my legacy in this industry is to build bridges to future storytellers. So that's what I decided to do in that moment. And we met monthly and the focus of TRIBE is really just sharpening your hard skills and your soft skills. Hard skills: How do you write an outline? Soft skills: How do you survive narcissists? So we toggle between these two things by having panels, different writers."
She continues, "We started a short film program as part of TRIBE, which was getting the writers who were interested in it, submitting short film scripts so that we could independently fund them. And by independently, I mean me. I'm funding them. My goal is to make the first round of TRIBE completely from me so I can prove that it's a model that works. And then also to get outside funding and set up fiscal sponsorship so that we can receive donations so that it can become a sustainable program much like Dan Lin's Rideback program. It's the same thing. It's just led by someone who's key influential parameters are people of color."
"We make work," Aniobi adds. "We make projects that make people of color feel good. That's what we're interested in."
TRIBE is currently in the process of selecting its second year applicants. A simple Instagram post elicited 910 submissions, "which was wild," Aniobi says, but that just means that "we can keep this thing going." Clearly there's a need for TRIBE and the work it's churning out. Aniobi describes TRIBE's inaugural film, 7 Minutes of Heaven by Pages Matam, recently named one of Circle of Confusion's Writers Discovery Fellows, as a "delightful little romantic dramedy."
"It was good to be a part of a fellowship where she's teaching you the things that it takes beyond just a script to really be successful in this industry, and to build networks and viable relationships that are going to help your career flourish," Matam says. "TRIBE has been made to hold space for us, to allow us the space to fail, and to push us always along the way to continue to succeed. With an incredible amount of kindness. Everything that Amy does comes from a place of kindness and empathy. Don't get me wrong, she'll let you know if you ain't right — if you ain't doing what you're supposed to do, she'll get in your ass about it. But even the way she speaks, the way that she gives notes, it's always from a place of kindness and of building. It's been an incredible journey and an incredible networking experience."
Alicia Vera/HBO Max
Matam's film is in post-production, and Aniobi is keeping busy with her myriad other projects. Under her overall deal with HBO, which includes a few comedic projects in development, Aniobi's production company Superspecial has optioned Vanessa Walters' novel The Nigerwife, about foreign women who marry Nigerian men, to develop into a drama series. The novel, coming out in June 2023, clearly has personal significance to Aniobi and her Nigerian heritage, but she's interested in exploring any story that tells of an adult coming-of-age — her favorite genre is "who am I?"
Then there's the next season of Rap Sh!t, though Aniobi's not quite sure what Shawna and Mia will get into, or if they'll get into anything at all. Last we saw of Aida Osman's Shawna, she was running away from the cops, just as she and Mia (KaMillion) had announced their first tour.
"What I see in season 2, just based on the setup, I'm like, I want to see this tour," Aniobi says. "I want to see if the tour even happens, to be honest, because I'm like, you can set that up and then things fall apart. Because I love two versions for these rap queens: What are they in failure? And what are they in success? So season 2 could either be them on tour and feeling the success of that or the tour completely tanks and it doesn't happen. I'm like, either way, satisfying story."
And in the end, that's what Aniobi craves: a satisfying story.
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