Juanita Anderson is a producer, documentary filmmaker, still photographer and media
educator who was born and raised in Detroit, MI. A 2024 Kresge Artist Fellow in Film, her
work in public and independent media spans nearly five decades. Over the course of her
career, she has mentored multiple generations of emerging and established filmmakers
and has launched some 15 projects into the national PBS schedule. Anderson is perhaps
best known for her role as executive producer of the 1988 Academy Award-nominated
documentary feature film, Who Killed Vincent Chin? (a film by Christine Choy and Renee
Tajima) which garnered a duPont Columbia Silver Baton, a George Foster Peabody Award,
and was inducted into the U.S. National Film Registry in 2021. Her most recent film, Sydney
G. James: How We See Us, is included in the 2023 Firelight Media/American Masters short
film series In The Making. The film has screened in fifteen film festivals across North
America and in Australia, garnering six film festival awards and a Silver Telly. Anderson is
currently the Bob Allison (Allesee) Endowed Chair in Media and Professor of Teaching in the
Department of Communication at Wayne State University where she has been a faculty
member since 2003. She is also Resident Artist in Media Arts at The Carr Center in Detroit
and a 2024-2026 recipient of the inaugural Gilbert Family Foundation/United States Artists
Seed and Bloom Fellowship. A co-founder of the National Black Programming Consortium
(Black Public Media) in 1979, Anderson currently serves on the board of directors of
Working Films and American Documentary, Inc.