The Black population gets the recognition they deserve.
“It all started during the pandemic,” Amy Aniobi stated of her talent incubator, TRIBE, “and this churning feeling that I had of how do I continue to build that bridge.”
Aniobi has used many bridges in her career, especially the ones she had to build herself. Like other great leaders, she plans to make the way easier and less hassle for those who follow her.
Born and raised in Texas and of Nigerian ancestry, Aniobi left the Lone Star State in search of new hopes in California and Stanford.
She meets Issa Rae there. However, it wasn’t until Aniobi was in grad school that she and Rae began collaborating on Awkward Black Girl, the web series that later became known as Insecure.
The writers of Awkward Black Girl gather at Aniobi’s West Hollywood apartment every Wednesday night and eventually create two seasons.
“By day, I was an assistant and then by night I was a staffed TV writer on a web series. It was a really beautiful time,” the 38-year-old said about the show, which was released on 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.”
Aniobi has contributed her writing skills to shows such as Silicon Valley, 2 Dope Queens, and Trial & Error. However, she began to question her own comedic stunts.
Her time working on Awkward Black Girl and being in an space with “someone who looked like me, who fully saw me,” was something she had been seeking for a long time – finally and completely dawned on her when she worked in the Insecure writers’ room in 2016.
Aniobi went from producing Season 1 (and earning a 2020 Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy nomination) to writing the hilarious and critically acclaimed first episode of the fifth and final season and directing the seventh episode.
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Aniobi Trains Writers
She absorbed much learning in her time with Rae and at Insecure, like the significance 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,” she said.
Aniobi would later bring that lesson to heart in her next experience.
Following the end of Insecure, Aniobi proceeded to Rap Sh!t – a comedy series that was launched in July that follows female rap partners inspired by the rise of City Girls – which was created by Rae.
However, ahead of all that, the pandemic happened. Writers’ rooms became Zoom rooms, and rapidly everyone was being held inside the house. Aniobi was among the mentoring writers; they all appeared to have similar problems.
“I don’t know how to network. I don’t know how to find people. I don’t know how to build a community through Zoom,” she said, citing the concerns of beginning writers.
And that’s how TRIBE was born. Aniobi founded the talent incubator as a one-year writers’ membership program and an ongoing career network for writers centering on connecting the gaps between writing independently and writing as a career in January 2021.
“So, bitch was crazy,” Aniobi emphasized.
“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.”
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