Azsaneé TrusS

Azsaneé Truss, PhD is a Thinking Artist who seeks to build worlds and imagine liberatory futures through her artistic and scholarly practices. She works in a variety of mediums including collage, sound, and film, often playing with Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist aesthetics. Drawing inspiration from music, literature, and quotidian Black life, while also embracing fluid inspiration, Truss’s work is an exercise in conversing with the archives, speculation, re-memory, and personal exploration. Her goal is to bring accessible contemporary art to a broad public and inspire people to consider the types of futures they’re working toward. 

Truss’s work is rooted in the communities that hold her, the people who have shaped her, and the collective knowledge that emerges from shared struggle and joy. Her work is deeply concerned with the beauty and complexity of Black life. As such, she collaborates with fellow artists and cultural workers to engage with the city's rich cultural and intellectual traditions, and create work that both reflects the realities of Blackness. She has collaborated with organizations such as The Arts League; the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Paul Robeson House; and the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, and her art has been featured in spaces such as the Da Vinci Art Alliance, the Penn Museum’s Rainey Auditorium, and City Hall.

Truss also holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, her dissertation utilized the frameworks of cultural studies and media studies to research conspiracy theorizing in Black American art and media as a subversive discursive practice. She has also published and presented work on radical imagination in Black media, storytelling across the African diaspora, and how digital technologies shape new modes of expression. As a multimodal scholar, Truss collaborates with fellow artists, scholars, and cultural workers to produce scholarship that is accessible to audiences both within and outside of the academy.