Photographer, educator and global citizen, Anya Dennis, a native of Philadelphia, photographed her first subject at age eighteen. While attending Clark Atlanta University she traveled to Ghana, West Africa in 1997 to study literature at the University of Ghana. This experience afforded her the opportunity to record the marvelous images that colored Africa’s complex cultural and geographical terrain. It was this journey that gave birth to her passion for photography. Determined to explore the relationship between culture and identity, her travels across the continent from West to East Africa provided her the blank canvas she needed to further develop as an artist and prompted her commitment to photograph as a means of capturing the soul.

In 2000, while conducting independent research in Ethiopia, Egypt, Israel and Brazil, Anya Dennis visually explored religion and its impact on societal norms. Her passion for teaching and the profound inspiration she draws from photography led her back to Africa in 2003 to teach English in the small village of Abbiyi Addi, expanding her photographic body of work; a work that includes portraits from Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar. Her more recent travels to Cuba, Belize, Guatemala, and Peru between 2005-2008, were later added to the montage of her photographic stroke. Today, Anya Dennis continues to shoot real life subject matter in the country and around the world. Her published work can be found in Free Magazine and Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (vol6.).

“In the troubled world in which we live, there is a need for beauty and images that are soothing to the mind and spirit. My highest aspiration is to make visible the invisible by capturing the soul of a subject. Through photography, I experience life, the spiritual as well as the mundane.

I strive to make images that open the heart of the viewer, that share a very personal sense of place, to which all who see are welcome. Immersed in this place, my images savor the deeply emotional and spiritual responses to culture and identity. What I see, hear and feel somehow come together to create the “essence of being” seen through the eye of a photographer. I’m often asked the perplexed question of, why did you take this picture or what inspired you to capture this photograph? My response to these questions is that I've chosen my images, as I have chosen my parents, freely, whole-heartedly, and without a moment’s regret. Which is another way of saying; I don't choose my images at all . . . my images chose me.”

Phone: 718.399.1779

Email: