The night before Janelle Monae revealed the first glimpse of the “emotion picture” she had commissioned to accompany her latest album, “Dirty Computer,” was a restless one.

She was about to release “Make Me Feel,” a slinky, Prince-esque sex jam with a visual that showed her torn between a female or male lover, part of a short film that imagined a dystopian world in which humans are wiped clean of memories and identities disfavored by society.

Kept awake by anxiety over how fans would respond to her work, Monae wondered if dropping something as intense as an album and short film illuminating the personal liberation of a queer black woman in today’s America was the right decision.

“When I’m working on art, my responsibility is to the truth and wherever I am at that time. And maybe my truth this time around would turn some people off,” she recalled from the Atlanta studios of her Wondaland Arts Society entertainment company. “There were a lot of reasons that I could find to not press the send button on the music and on the visuals.

“But I didn’t allow that fear to get in the way of my freedom,” she continued, “and my freedom of expressing myself.”

After establishing herself as an innovative, idiosyncratic visionary who makes funky, genre-bending music that conjures glossy Afrofuturist fantasies by way of an alter-ego named Cindi Mayweather, Monae took her biggest risk yet by pressing the send button on “Dirty Computer.”

Now, the 33-year-old polymath is — to take a line from the album — living her best “crazy, classic life” with a record that kept her on the road for much of 2018, turned her into a queer icon and topped pretty much every critic’s year-end list.

In just the past few weeks, Monae was named trailblazer of the year at Billboard’s Women in Music awards, her film “Welcome to Marwen” opened in theaters across the country, and she scored two Grammy nominations: “Dirty Computer” will vie for the night’s biggest honor, album of the year, and the visual for “Pynk,” a glorious ode to black sapphics that broke the internet (and heated up speculation about a romance with actress Tessa Thompson), is up for video of the year.

The film division of her Wondaland imprint announced a first-look deal with Universal Pictures to produce multi-genre content with an emphasis on “highlighting marginalized voices.”

“This is the year that I feel like I took the most risks as an artist — visually, sonically and personally,” she says. “There’s fun in feeling free, and I’m having a lot of fun in this freedom. It has been incredible to tour and meet people who have directly been impacted by me walking in my truth and them walking in their truth a little bit more as a result. It’s humbling and it feels like I’m just getting started, honestly.”

Those who were following Monae before her sensational arrival as an actress in the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” and the historical space race drama “Hidden Figures,” or before she declared herself “The Electric Lady” on her fantastic 2013 breakout album, and most certainly before she donned hot pink pants modeled after the vagina for a video in which she proudly claimed her identity as a queer woman (“Let the rumors be true,” she sings at one point on the album), know her ambitions have always been boundless.

Monae crash-landed in Atlanta, where Southern rap icon Big Boi — one half of the groundbreaking group OutKast — helped launch her career, after the turn of the millennium. Monae emerged as an adventurous voice long before mainstream audiences caught on to the alternative, arty sound she was perfecting.

Her experimental approach to R&B (she melds neo-soul, funk, hip-hop, disco, psychedelic rock and electronica) was echoed in the intricately crafted legend of Cindi Mayweather— the rebellious, time-traveling messianic android character who stood at the center of her “Metropolis” series, a seven-part epic that unfurled across her catalog starting with her 2007 EP “Metropolis: Suite I (the Chase).”

Monae created a world in which outcasts and misfits had a voice, and she went from underground sensation in the Atlanta scene to pop anomaly.

And yet she remained an enigma — albeit a fabulously stylish one wrapped in a signature black-and white-uniform (which she calls a tribute to her working-class upbringing) — never breaking from the Mayweather character onstage or in public. The line where Mayweather ended and Monae began was a blurry one, which allowed Monae to make the music she wanted while keeping a safe distance from the public.

For years, Monae’s funky escapades as Mayweather took us on such a wild ride that it didn’t matter that she was keeping listeners at arm’s length. Monae never shied away from channeling her feelings through her android persona.

“I’m tryna find my peace/ I was made to believe there’s something wrong with me and it hurts my heart,” she sings on “Cold War,” a powerful testimony of empowerment from her debut studio album, 2010’s “The ArchAndroid.” It was one of the countless times when she chipped away at the wall she’d erected between Mayweather and herself and gave the world a piece of her pain.

“There are so many labels that are placed on women, black women in particular, or queer folks, before we come out the womb,” she says. “We’re not supposed to act in a certain way, depending on what community we’re in. We’re always having to listen to people tell us that we need to adjust or conform. Look at the media and how we are portrayed. The lack of representation. There are so many different voices that come our way, saying we’re not good enough; we’re not quite good enough. And sometimes you believe that. But I learned to stop listening to those voices and realize it’s a choice to choose being happy with where you are in life.”

Working on “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures” — films centered in blackness and, in the case of the former, identity and sexuality — helped Monae realize she needed to tell her own story and not hide behind her futuristic persona. And that’s what made “Dirty Computer” such a balm for many.

To be embraced, and rewarded, at a mainstream level the way Monae has over the past year blows her away — especially considering her Grammy nominations conclude a year that began with her call to arms to fight sexism and inequality in the music industry and in the world.

There’s not a day that goes by when she’s not surrounded by music, she says, and she’s he midst of reading widely (James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and “The Great Cosmic Mother” by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor currently have her attention) and sketching ideas for visuals and concepts as she plots her next move. When asked what’s in store in the new year, however, Mayweather takes over for the first time in our conversation.