The Gibbs Sisters, Shawnelle Gibbs & Shawnee Gibbs, are an award-winning writing team from Oakland, California with backgrounds in television, animation, and comics. They have written for Warner Bros. Animation, Dreamworks Animation, Cartoon Networks and Marvel Comics.
The sisters are graduates of Oakland Technical High School and hold Bachelor of Arts degrees in Cinema from San Francisco State University.
Their work has been featured in the long-running Ladies Night Anthology comic book series published by Graham Cracker Comics. Their historical comic book adventure series, The Invention of E.J. Whitaker, a diverse re-imagining of the early 20th century, made its comic book debut in 2018, and their debut graphic novel, Ghost Roast, published by HarperCollins / Versify will be released in Fall of 2023.
The Gibbs sisters made their Marvel comics debut in Women of Marvel #1 (2023).
Shawnee and Shawnelle are writers of the animated history series Hidden Heroes based on the plays of Abigail McGrath, a collaborator of Andy Warhol.
The Gibbs Sisters' films have been featured in the Oakland International Film Festival and been awarded by the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.
On their paternal side, the sisters are descendants of the Hackett family, some of the earliest-known African American settlers in the Oakland / San Francisco Bay Area.
The sisters' influences include Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, Maya Angelou, Steven Spielberg, Morrie Turner, Aaron McGruder and Hayao Miyazaki.
