Azsaneé Truss

Azsaneé Truss is a thinking artist who studies the role of multimodal forms in structuring liberatory knowledge production processes. Her work is a Black feminist approach to multimodal theory, grounded in the theoretical and political traditions of cultural studies, performance studies, critical media studies, and Black studies.

Truss’s dissertation work focuses on Black American conspiracy theorizing as a form of subversive thought. This project explicates the culturally specific roots and logics of these practices and understand them as a type of vernacular theory grounded in critical and embodied understandings of historical and modern-day racialized oppression. Through a critical multimodal discursive analysis of some of the Black art and media where these theories have been particularly prevalent, this work aims to understand the centrality of medium/form in creating and communicating subversive ideas. 

In addition to her dissertation work, Truss also studies popular culture, the limits of neoliberal representation, youth media, birth work as practices of futurity, Black radical imagination, and the speculative. She uses podcasting, photography, collage, film, and other media, in addition to traditional written forms in her work. In accordance with Black feminist approaches to research, her work fundamentally seeks to disrupt hegemonic ideas about what constitutes legitimate scholarship through these multimodal practices. Her work has been published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Prior to joining Annenberg, Truss earned her M.A. in Instructional Technology & Media from Teachers College, Columbia University. Here, she studied the ways in which media production can be used to both teach youth critical media literacy skills and teach us about the world they hope to create. She was profiled as a featured graduate for her work at Teachers College.