Anicka Austin is an interdisciplinary artist, mother, and archivist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Ritual from her upbringing in the Southern Primitive Baptist church and a draw towards spiritual movement practices inform her choreographic process. Repetition, endurance and devotion shape a meditative movement vocabulary. Her focus on embodied archives and the tension between ephemerality and documentation grew from creative process as a 2017-2018 WonderRoot Hughley Fellow. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Carolina Academic Library Associates fellowship, graduating with a Master of Science in Library Science in 2020.
Her choreographic work has been presented by Atlanta Downtown Improvement District (2023) and Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center (2022) and screened at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Indie Grits Festival, Roxbury Film Festival, and BLOWUP: International Arthouse FILM FEST (2020-2021). She presented written scholarship and community engagement pops-ups around site-specific performance in Atlanta’s public spaces as Art on the Beltline Scholar-in-Residence (2021-2022). She is co-author of Composite Harmonies: Reclaiming Memory Artifacts through Community Creative Practice (2025). She was visiting archivist for the Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade papers at Emory University from 2020-2022 and wrote a chapter for an upcoming anthology on Holder’s life about the process.