Anita J McKenzie - Award Winning photographer and cultural activist joins the Urban Kapital team
Anita J McKenzie likes to write articles, conduct interviews, and use photography and cultural activism to explore a variety of themes, including creativity, lifestyle, identity, freedom and belonging. Her sense of solidarity with others stems from her background and lived experience as a woman of African and Indian heritage, born in the UK via Jamaica and she aligns with others on the basis of shared values around compassion, equity and justice.
As an award winning cultural heritage and arts organiser (2005), she has worked on projects with a range of partners, including museums, educational projects and community organisations to explore issues of history, racial and cultural identity and justice – from a rich historical legacy, that has been often left untold. She supports groups and individuals to tell their stories through visual arts and photography, and writing illustrated with photography. Anita started out by writing art reviews for Spare Rib Magazine, which was then a feminist publication based in London. She took a break to raise her family and now follows the creative process to projects that speak to her heart. For example, her recent exhibition ‘A Sense of Place – Caribbean Women in the Landscape’ was a great success. She also partnered with Urban Kapital and The Museum of Colour to produce a dedicated exhibition magazine that featured Black Women’s experience of living on the Kent coast, in the UK. In 1996 Anita set up the first commercial Black Picture library and archive in the UK, called McKenzie Heritage Picture Archive (MHPA), which she directed and managed for eleven years, until she became an Interfaith Minister and Spiritual Counselor, she is also a marriage registrar. Anita has followed an interesting path choosing to take a portfolio approach to life, study and career. She holds a PG Dip in Communications, PG Dip Intercultural Therapy, a BA in Culinary Arts and Business Management, has trained in Transformation Mediation, and certified in Plant-based Nutrition, as a Meditation Instructor and as a Health Educator among a range of other related skills. Anita’s work has been focused on history, spirituality, wellbeing, plant-based nutrition and racial and cultural identity and justice. Her interest in producing illustrated articles and photojournalism has been recently rekindled through her 2022 exhibition and she is looking forward to writing and photographing stories that will inform and inspire the Urban Kapital readership.
Follow Anita @anitascreative and @anitajisworld
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