Anicka Austin is a choreographer and archivist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Carolina Academic Library Associates fellowship, graduating in May 2020 with a Master of Science in Library Science. She currently works as Collections Processing Archivist at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. Her focus on embodied archives and the tension between ephemerality and documentation grew from creative process as a 2017-2018 WonderRoot Hughley Fellow. In 2023, Sierra King and Austin collaborated on Untitled, a dance-based installation supported by Atlanta Downtown Improvement District to elucidate the archive as a source for meditation on the interior worlds of Black women artists.
Her choreographic work has been presented by Elevate Atlanta, The Lucky Penny (2015-2018), and Fulton County Arts and Culture and exhibited at Gallery 72, the Zuckerman Museum of Art’s Fine Arts Gallery, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. As artist-researcher, she presented written scholarship and choreography on site-specific performance in Atlanta’s public spaces as Atlanta Art on the Beltline Scholar-in-Residence (2021-2022) and is co-author of Composite Harmonies: Reclaiming Memory Artifacts through Community Creative Practice (2025).
Thank you!
Photographs by John Stephens, Alan Kimara Dixon, Lev Omelchenko, and Anicka Austin