Azsaneé TrusS

Azsaneé Truss 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 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. Truss’s community is integral to her practice and collectivity is a significant thread in her work. 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 is also a PhD Candidate (and soon-to-be graduate) of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, she uses frameworks of cultural studies and media studies to research Black cultural production as valid knowledge production. Her research centers Black expressive culture as a site of theory and resistance. In this vein, her dissertation focuses on conspiracy theorizing in Black art and media as a subversive discursive practice. Truss 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. She has won two Top Paper Awards from the National Communication Association, and has presented in cities around the world: from Paris, France to New York City to Dakar, Senegal.

In sum, her work sits at the intersections of art, media, and scholarship. Whether through film, sound, collage, curation, or organizing, her goal is to build spaces that cultivate possibility.