Juanita Anderson

Juanita Anderson is a producer, director, still photographer and media educator who was born and raised in Detroit. Her creative work Her creative work is concerned with the lifeways and cultural histories of people of African descent, the arts in society, and the responses to social injustice that amplify the voices of communities too seldom represented on screen.  She is best known for her work as executive producer of the 1989 Academy Award-nominated feature film WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN? (a film by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima), which garnered a duPont Columbia Silver Baton, a George Foster Peabody Award, and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2021. She was also the executive producer of the ITVS-commissioned series POSITIVE: LIFE WITH HIV; the FAVORITE POEM PROJECT VIDEO ANTHOLOGY, and the PBS/NBPC public affairs special, BLACK AMERICA: FACING THE MILLENNIUM, which she also directed.  Her directorial credits also include a range of short films and video essays including 18th & VINE: A PEOPLE’S JOURNEY, created for permanent exhibition at the Museums at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and the 2022 documentary SYDNEY G. JAMES: HOW WE SEE US which is included in season two of the American Masters/Firelight Media short film series In the Making. Anderson was the 2019-2022 Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts at Wayne State University, where she heads the Department of Communication’s Media Arts & Studies programs and has served as a faculty member since 2003. She is also the Resident Artist in Media Arts at The Carr Center in Detroit. A long-standing advocate for diversity in public media and the arts, Anderson was a co-founder of the National Black Programming Consortium (now Black Public Media), a past president of the National Conference of Artists, the nation’s longest-standing African American visual arts organization, and is currently serves on the board of directors of American Documentary, Inc. She is a 2022 Firelight Media Spark Fund recipient in conjunction with her documentary feature work-in-progress HASTINGS STREET BLUES.