About Umami Bee

Umami Bee is an award-winning Los Angeles–based artist and muralist whose work explores concept, ancestry, nature, and the human experience. At the center of her practice is a philosophy she calls “Art That Moves”—work created to move the viewer emotionally while seeming to move itself through texture, light, reflection, and perspective.

Bee’s path to becoming an artist began during a six-month period in which she stepped away from technology entirely. In the absence of screens, devices, and the constant noise of the outside world, she found God and discovered a spirituality that fundamentally changed her life. She describes that period as the time when God spoke the loudest—not audibly, but through her heart. In that stillness, she began creating outside, experimenting with unconventional tools, natural elements, and whatever materials she could find.

What began as experimentation became something Bee understood as a calling. She believes with conviction that creating art is what she was put here to do, describing her heart as her contract with God—an understanding that the vision she has been given comes with a responsibility to follow it.

Her work is deeply conceptual and intuitive. Bee is fascinated by the natural world, ancestry, memory, and the things that make us human. Her lineage is an important part of that exploration, and she believes her ancestors speak through her work. Raw textures, coffee stains, natural tones, unconventional materials, and reflective gold have become recurring parts of her visual language.

These materials are also essential to Art That Moves. Reflective surfaces transform as the viewer changes position, while layers of texture catch light and create shifting shadows and depth. A piece can reveal something different depending on where you stand, how the light hits it, or how long you spend with it. For Bee, that movement is emotional, physical, and metaphysical. She approaches a work of art as something living—an exchange between artist, material, viewer, ancestry, and spirit.

As her practice has grown, so has its scale. An award-winning muralist, Bee has participated in mural festivals across the country and received both the Judges’ Choice and Community Choice awards at Portsmouth, Virginia’s Wall Street Mural Festival. She is drawn instinctively to working large and believes it is her duty to paint her experience across the world.

Looking forward, Bee intends to expand her practice beyond canvas and murals into large-scale installations and immersive environments. The scale and medium may change, but the purpose remains the same: to create something raw, captivating, alive, and capable of leaving the viewer different than it found them.