Juanita Anderson

Juanita Anderson is a producer, director, still photographer and media educator who was born and raised in Detroit. Her creative work lies at the intersection of cultural history, artistic expression 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 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 forthcoming documentary short, Reclamation (2022), produced in collaboration with the Detroit Narrative Agency and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

In 2019, Anderson was named the Wayne State University Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts, 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) and is a past president of the National Conference of Artists, the nation’s longest-standing African American visual arts organization.

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