Azsaneé TrusS

Azsaneé Truss, PhD is a Thinking Artist and scholar whose practice moves fluidly between the archive and the speculative. Broadly speaking, she engages her scholarly and artistic practices to understand Black cultural production as sites of theory, resistance, and world-making around the globe.

Truss holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research examined conspiracy theorizing in Black American art and media as a form of vernacular theory. Through critical multimodal discourse analyses of conspiracy theories in Black art and media, this work seeks to understand how these forms structure alternative, subversive modes of knowledge production. She is currently developing her first book, Cultural Production, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Black(ened) Epistemologies (working title), supported by a Hershey Humanities Manuscript Development Workshop grant. Her published and presented work spans radical imagination in Black feminist art, dance as a mode of diasporic knowledge production, and the racialized stakes of conspiracy theorizing as a speculative practice.

As the Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Experimental Ethnography, she works across text, film, sound, and collage to explore knowledges that can be felt, not just read. She collaborates with artists, scholars, and cultural workers to build work that lives inside and outside the academy. She has worked alongside organizations such as ArtPhilly, the Sachs Program for Arts and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania, the Free Library of Philadelphia, The Arts League, and the Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy.