England native Anohni has been breaking boundaries in the performing arts for years now. As a teen, she moved to New York, founded a performance collective called Blacklips, and began singing in late-night bars and clubs and working in small theater productions. After receiving a grant for her show "The Birth of Anne Frank/The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson," she gathered a band of musicians, who would eventually become known as Antony and the Johnsons, to perform the score. The art-pop group eventually met massive success in the music world.
She knew she was trans from a young age but struggled with femininity. "I was never going to become a beautiful, passable woman, and I was never going to be a man," she told The Guardian in 2016. "It's a quandary. But the trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it's one of nature's best ideas." Proud trans kids, she added, "give other people license to explore themselves more deeply, allowing the colors in their own psyche to flourish."
In the early 2010s, Anohni pivoted to a solo career and began focusing her energies and art on climate change and ecological collapse. "Artists have different responsibilities in different eras," Anohni told The New York Times. "At this point, I really feel like it's all hands on deck." She released "4 Degrees," the debut single from her 2016 album, "Hopelessness," on the eve of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. "We don't have the luxury of time any more," she added.
She frequently speaks out about the interconnected factors that play into the climate crisis, adding up to a phenomenon she calls ecocide, the central theme of "Hopelessness." "Racism, endgame international corporate governance, trickle-up economics, ever-greater wealth disparity, fundamentalism, extremism, corrupt foreign policy, weapons trade, fossil fuel, endgame mineral extraction, stealing and raping earth . . . It bottlenecks in ecocide," she said in a 2016 interview with Loud and Quiet. "It all draws together into a bouquet that you could call ecocide."
As for her recent projects, she's constantly creating. In 2019, she released a conceptual art piece called "Love" reflecting on queer storytelling, environmental activism, and other themes; in 2021, she collaborated with Yoko Ono for a mini digital festival focusing on the climate crisis and COVID-19; and in 2022, she released a new song with Hercules & Love Affair called "One" — and that's to name just a few of her monumental, urgent artistic endeavors.
