vanessa german[1] (born 1976)[2] is an American sculptor, painter, writer, activist, performer, and poet based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[10] She was the winner of the 2018 Don Tyson Prize, a biannual $200,000 award from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

[16] She describes her work as heavily influenced by her childhood in Los Angeles, where her mother encouraged the children to make their own clothes, and she was also impacted by the AIDS epidemic and drive-by shootings.

[18] She creates them by decorating and painting large dolls and figures, then sculpting outward by adding a wide range of materials including objects like cowrie shells, plastic guns, feathers, bottle caps, seashells, toys, and vintage products.

[2] She discovered that her work included elements similar to the central African tradition of Nkisi nkondi, guardian statues pierced with nails and other materials.

[3] Recurring themes addressed in her work include food, birds, violence, injustice, poverty, and Black Madonna imagery.

[20][21] In her artist statement for 2016's dontsaythatshitoutloud, she describes the impact of finding two men murdered outside her house within a four-month period.

"[1] german also led the ARThouse and Love Front Porch, a community art institution, in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA.[7] She started the ARThouse when she needed to start creating artworks on her front porch because her basement ceiling was too low: her large sculptural pieces had to be taken apart to be removed from the basement.

[16] In 2012, Love Front Porch received a $4,000 grant from the Sankofa Fund of Southwest Pennsylvania, which highlights empowering grass-roots African-American community projects.

[26] german also ran the Tuesday Night Monologue Project at ARThouse, a weekly event where guest artists and members of the community could write and share works with each other.

german fundraised to renovate the space but decided to leave Homewood herself and moved to North Carolina, describing the impact of living in a community with significant violence by saying "It became impossible to work there because I was scared so much of the time.