Akeema Anthony ’06 —Artist, Film Educator, Board Chair of School of Making Thinking

by Rich Beebe P'10

“When I think back to my time at Westover, I remember most of my service centering on food-soup kitchens mostly,” said Akeema Anthony ’06, an independent artist — known as Akeema- Zane — and a part-time film educator at Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) in New York City.

Akeema sees a connection between her time at Westover and her work now as an NY4CA Artist Advocate, who supports New York City-based artists of various disciplines with their advocacy efforts that range from housing and healthcare to fair artist wages.

“I am inspired,” Akeema explained, “to think through ways to activate, challenge, and restructure how we practice care for and to our most vulnerable communities and can credit my time at Westover as a generative container for helping to launch some of my critical thinking in this area.”

Since beginning her post at MDC in 2021, Akeema said, “I have facilitated a workshop of my own portfolio of curriculum design. This work is funded by the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Trust and integrates a multidisciplinary approach to the documentary form, while uplifting themes of Ellison’s most canonical work — Invisible Man. In more recent years, scholars have concerned themselves with the full repertoire of Ralph Ellison, which illuminates his multidisciplinary artistic life, which includes music and photography.”

Akeema became affiliated with The School of Making Thinking (SMT) through executive director, Sophie Traub, “working alongside them in a process-focused collaborative group known as Rotten Spring. We came together in the wake of the 2016 election and established a performance ethic and score of our group dynamics that we eventually performed after eight months of rigorous exchange.” Rotten Spring went on to teach a workshop “Consensual Collaboration and Micro-culture” with SMT. In 2018, she was an artist-in-residence of the Immersion 2.0 program.

SMT functions as “a nomadic experiential and experimental ‘school,’” Akeema explained, “offering residences, workshops, festivals, etc. to artists who value collaboration and immersive experiences. Immersion, the residency, is a three-week virtual reality experience that takes place in Wilmington, NC, in partnership with our hosts, Cucalorus Film Festival, where I also recently accepted the invitation to serve as a board member.”

“In 2019,” Akeema added, “I was invited to perform at The Clouds Gathering festival which featured the work of performance artists, and later was invited to facilitate the postponed residency for summer 2020, which eventually included my facilitation of the 2022 and 2023 summer Immersion sessions. In 2021, I joined the SMT Board of Directors and, after several months, was elected Board Chair.”

As noted on the SMT website, “Our programs ask: How does art deepen thought and provoke questioning? How is thinking enacted through creative mediums? And how can an environment be structured or resist structuring in such a way that these questions cannot only be asked but be lived as well?” 

Beyond her own work as an independent artist and film educator, Akeema has been active in supporting artists in various endeavors and means of interaction. As an artist and researcher, she works across literature, sound design and music composition, film, and moving image media.

Through archival research, electronic media, experimentation, improvisation, bricolage, and collaboration, Akeema thinks through themes of labor, urbanization, globalization, internationalism, virtuality, and self-possession. Her practices have been greatly informed by her experiences as a student, performer, colleague, and/or artist-resident of Westover; Eugene Lang, New School University; The One World Exchange; The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Groundation Grenada; Cave Canem; MDC; Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism; UnionDocs, and SMT.