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As a performance artist, writer, educator, and life coach Piper Anderson has dedicated the last twelve years to holding space for community, peace, and power to manifest. From public schools, non-profit organizations, to detention facilities, and Ivy League universities Piper Anderson is well known for her dynamic, inspiring, performances, workshops, and lectures.
Piper’s performance work blends poetry, song, movement, storytelling, and video to create work that explores the experiences of women and their relationship to Spirit, healing, and power. In 1999, she premiered the Hip Hop performance work, BLACK GIRL SPEAK at Frontera Fest in Austin, TX. The show is inspired by the harsh and sometimes-bittersweet realities, she witnessed while growing up in Philadelphia. In 2006, she wrote and performed her second solo performance work, IN HER MEMORY, in honor of two family members lost to domestic violence. She has toured nationally with the show, utilizing her performance work as a catalyst for community dialogues about intimate partner violence. In 2011, while completing The Field’s Emerging Artist Residency, Anderson began work on her third solo performance work, BILLIE, which will premiere in NYC in fall 2012.
In 2001, Piper joined Blackout Arts Collective (BAC), a national organization committed to using the arts as a tool for social change in communities of color. Piper worked with BAC in a number of capacities, coordinating youth development programming and organizing four national tours in response to prisons and policing under the banner of LYRICS ON LOCKDOWN. Eventually her dedication to the organization led to her appointment as National Program Director.
Anderson is a highly sought after presenter at universities, secondary schools, and non-profits offering workshops and lectures on a range of topics related to the arts, education, and activism. Just a few of the places her work has taken her include Harvard University, UC-Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia University, Bard College, New WORLD Theatre, and Kigali Institute of Education in Rwanda. In addition, Piper is a part-time faculty member at Gallatin School at New York University, and a Company Member and Master Teaching-Artist with American Place Theatre.
As an author, Piper’s writings have been published in four books, How To Get Stupid White Men Out Of Office, Growing Up Girl: Voices From Marginalized Spaces, Conscious Women Rock the Page, and Love, Race & Liberation in addition to numerous journals and publications.
Anderson majored in Community Studies with a minor in Theatre at The University of Texas-Austin before moving to New York City and transferring to The New School where she was a Riggio Writing Democracy Fellow and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts. She also holds Master of Arts in Applied Theatre from CUNY-School of Professional Studies.
