ANOHNI

Their self-titled first album was released in 2000 on David Tibet's label Durtro. Their second album, I Am a Bird Now (2005), was a commercial and critical success, earning her the Mercury Music Prize. In 2016, Anohni became the first openly transgender performer nominated for an Academy Award; she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, along with J. Ralph, for the song "Manta Ray" in the film Racing Extinction. Her debut solo album, Hopelessness, was released in May 2016 to wide critical acclaim, including another nomination for the Mercury Music Prize and a Brit Award. In 2023, as Anohni and the Johnsons, the artist released her sixth album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross.

• Name — Anohni • Landscape — yes • Born — 24 October 1971 • Birthplace — Chichester, West Sussex, England • Origin — New York City, United States • Genre — * Electronic • dance • experimental • chamber pop • art pop • Occupation — * Singer • songwriter • visual artist • Instrument — * Vocals • piano • Years Active — 1992-present • Label — Durtro, Secretly Canadian, Rough Trade • Current Member Of — Anohni and the Johnsons • Website — anohni.com

Anohni was born in Chichester, England, and identified as transgender from an early age. In 1977, her family moved to Amsterdam for a year, and then, in 1981, they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area of California, settling in San Jose, where Anohni attended Lincoln High School and studied music and was an avid record collector. Her mother Barbara is a photographer and her father Brendan was an IBM engineer and later a prominent Silicon Valley businessman who served as COO of Seagate Technology. She told The Telegraph in 2005, "I was listening to OMD, Kate Bush, Culture Club, Alison Moyet and especially Marc and the Mambas, which was this incredibly dark and emotional side project for Marc Almond." Anohni also recalled how she "saw [her] reflection" in Culture Club singer Boy George. In 1990, Anohni moved to Manhattan to attend Experimental Theater Wing at New York University. In 1992 she founded the performance collective Blacklips, later known as Blacklips Performance Cult, with creative partner Johanna Constantine, and she spent the next several years singing in after-hours bars and clubs using pre-recorded cassettes as self-accompaniment as well as writing and directing late-night theatre productions.

After being awarded a grant from New York Foundation for the Arts for the 1996 production of The Birth of Anne Frank/The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson at Performance Space 122, Anohni solicited accompanying musicians to record a number of songs she wrote in the early 1990s. The ensemble performed for the first time as "Antony and the Johnsons" at The Kitchen as part of William Basinski's installation "Life on Mars" in 1997. In 1999, the group began to perform more frequently at venues such as Joe's Pub and The Knitting Factory in New York City. British experimental musician David Tibet of Current 93 heard the recording and offered to release it through his Durtro record label; the debut album, Antony and the Johnsons, was released in 2000. In 2001, Anohni released a follow-up EP through Durtro, I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy, which, in addition to the title track, included a cover of a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti song "Mysteries of Love", and a Current 93 song, "Soft Black Stars". Antony and the Johnsons' 2005 album I Am a Bird Now featured guest performances by Lou Reed, Boy George, Rufus Wainwright and Devendra Banhart. The album was released in North America by Secretly Canadian Records and in Europe by Rough Trade. It won the UK's Mercury Prize and was named Album of the Year by Mojo magazine. The band toured North America, Europe, Australia and parts of South America for a year and a half in support of I am a Bird Now. The song "Bird Gerhl" was featured in the soundtrack for the movie V for Vendetta. • Illustration — Anohni in 2008 Antony and the Johnsons collaborated with experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas and presented Turning in November 2006 in Rome, London, Paris, Madrid, and Braga, Portugal. The concert featured live video portraits of a group of women from the New York City underground. The Guardian called the piece "fragile, life affirming, and truly wonderful (five stars)" Le Monde in Paris hailed Turning as "Concert-manifeste transsexuel." In 2007, Anohni created an original soundtrack for a video by Nick Knight featuring the designs of Hussein Chalayan. She collaborated in 2008 with Prada to create a song called "The Great White Ocean" for their promotional campaign. Antony and the Johnsons' 5-song Another World EP was released on 7 October 2008. Antony and the Johnsons' third album, The Crying Light, was released on 19 January 2009. The album peaked at number 1 on the European Billboard charts. Anohni has described the album as being "about landscape and the future." The album was mixed by Bryce Goggin and includes arrangements by Nico Muhly. Ann Powers wrote of The Crying Light for the LA Times online, "it's the most personal environmentalist statement possible, making an unforeseen connection between queer culture's identity politics and the green movement. As music, it's simply exquisite – more controlled and considered than anything Antony and the Johnsons have done and sure to linger in the minds of listeners." After touring throughout North America and Europe in support of their new album, Antony and the Johnsons presented a unique staging of "The Crying Light" with the Manchester Camerata at the Manchester Opera House for the 2009 Manchester International Festival. The concert hall was transformed with laser effects created by installation artist Chris Levine. Antony and the Johnsons went on to present concerts with symphonies across Europe in Summer 2009, including the Opera Orchestra of Lyon, the Metropole Orchestra, Roma Sinfonietta and the Montreux Jazz Festival Orchestra. At Salle Pleyel in Paris, Anohni appeared in a costume designed by Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy. Late 2010 saw the release of Thank You for Your Love EP and in October the full-length album Swanlights on Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade. Abrams Books also published a book edition of Swanlights featuring Anohni's drawings and collages with photography by Don Felix Cervantes. At the end of October, Anohni performed a concert in front of Chiaki Nagano's 1973 film "Mr O’s Book of the Dead" at Lincoln Center in New York City in commemoration of the passing of Kazuo Ohno. In January 2011, Anohni was a guest on Wintergasten, a program on Dutch Television's VPRO channel, and was interviewed by Leon Verdonschot discussing her political and ecological viewpoints in reference to different film clips. Anohni performed at the TED conference in Long Beach in 2011 in a session on "Radical Collaboration". During the 2011 Manchester International Festival, Anohni was musical director for The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a biography of the 'Godmother' of performance art, re-imagined by director Robert Wilson and co-starring Willem DaFoe, Marina Abramović and Anohni. The piece has subsequently been staged in Madrid, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Basel, Toronto (as part of the Luminato Festival) and New York. In January 2012, Antony and the Johnsons were presented by the Museum of Modern Art at Radio City Music Hall in "Swanlights", a collaboration with laser artist Chris Levine and set designer Carl Robertshaw. The performance was described by The New York Times in a review by Jon Parales entitled "Cries From the heart, Crashing Like Waves." This collaboration was also staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2013 and at Teatro Real in Madrid in 2014. • Illustration — Antony and the Johnsons perform with the Heritage Orchestra in 2012 Antony and the Johnsons released a live symphonic album in August 2012 entitled Cut the World featuring the Danish Radio Orchestra. The album features a spoken track called "Future Feminism" in which Anohni elaborates on her view of the connection between feminism and ecology. A video for the song "Cut the World" directed by Nabil Elderkin features Willem Dafoe, Carice van Houten and Marina Abramović. Anohni was the curator of Meltdown 2012 at the Southbank Centre in London. Anohni was "guest of honor" at the Melbourne Festival in October 2012, presenting a restaging of "Swanlights", as well as screening Charles Atlas' Turning, Lynette Wallworth's Coral: Rekindling Venus, and presenting Paradise, an exhibition of her drawings and collages. Anohni performed with orchestra for the 2013 Spring Givenchy collection in Paris, singing You Are My Sister and expanding on the theme of "Future Feminism" in literature distributed at the event. In June 2015, Antony and the Johnsons performed at Dark Mofo in Tasmania as a benefit in support of the Martu people of Parnngurr in Western Australia in their fight to prevent a uranium mine from being developed near their community by Canadian multinational Cameco and Mitsubishi. Anohni appeared with Martu representatives at a press conference at the MCA in Sydney and on ABC Australia's "Q and A" in further service of this cause. Anohni collaborated with composer J. Ralph on the song "Manta Ray" from the environmental documentary Racing Extinction. The song received a nomination for Best Original Song at the 88th Academy Awards. Anohni released a statement expressing discomfort over the academy's decision to characterize her in the days leading up to the ceremony as having been "cut" from the line-up due to "time constraints", despite never actually having been asked to perform in the first place. She stated that "singing about eco-cide... might not sell advertising space" and that the system is one "of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the U.S. to crush our dreams and our collective spirit". She did not attend the event.

On 23 February 2015, Anohni announced her fifth album, Hopelessness, via the Antony and the Johnsons website and Facebook account. Co-produced by Anohni, Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, it was her first album to be released under her name Anohni, one that she had been using in her personal life "for years". In the announcement, Anohni described the album as "an electronic record with some sharp teeth" and the UK's Independent described it as a "bitterly beautiful record". The Quietus explained, "Early interviews indicated a desire to create 'a dance / experimental electronic record with quite a dark thematic undertow', and in this regard Anohni and her collaborators have succeeded." On 30 November 2015, Anohni released "4 Degrees", the first song from Hopelessness. Commenting on the album's lead single in a fan interview earlier in the year, Anohni had stated that she had "grown tired of grieving for humanity", adding that she felt she "was not being entirely honest by pretending that I am not a part of the problem. '4 Degrees' is kind of a brutal attempt to hold myself accountable, not just valorize my intentions but also reflect on the true impact of my behaviors." On 9 March 2016, Anohni premiered the album's second single "Drone Bomb Me" on Annie Mac's show on BBC Radio 1 later that day, accompanied by a music video directed by Nabil Elderkin and starring English supermodel Naomi Campbell. The video Hopelessness was released on 6 May 2016 and was nominated for the 2016 Mercury Prize and a Brit. Anohni toured throughout Europe, the US and Australia in 2016, performing with her face obscured under a veil throughout the concert, in front of stark projections of a series of lip-synching women. The confrontational performance was described by The New York Times as a combination of "hard-core punk" and "radical empathy that's hard to find anywhere in pop." In early 2017 she went on to release a further EP entitled PARADISE, working with the same producers. The final track was awarded only to those who wrote to Anohni's email with "...a sentence or two what you care most about, or your hopes for the future. Send this to me instead of the dollar you used to send me in the olden days." In 2018, for the occasion of her exhibition at Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, Anohni released the track "Miracle Now" on YouTube, which features a video of 1990s New York transgender performance artist Page Reynolds, featured in The Johnsons' play MIRACLE NOW of 1996 as "The Last Dolphin." In 2020 Anohni released a single "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Bob Dylan and "Be My Husband", originally by Nina Simone. In the days after that year's Republican National Convention she released a protest single via YouTube called "R.N.C. 2020" with an accompanying essay published in The Guardian In October 2021 Anohni scored the multidisciplinary artists collective Drift's sculptural installation Fragile Future at The Shed. In January 2022 Anohni scored the Valentino Spring fashion show "Anatomy of Couture". In January 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Anohni at number 192 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

On May 16, 2023, Anohni announced the reappearance of her band, renaming it Anohni and the Johnsons. The band released a new single titled "It Must Change", produced by Jimmy Hogarth, with a music video starring British trans activist Munroe Bergdorf. The New York Times stated that "[a] cloud of elegy hangs over the song [...] as over the warming planet, while Anohni — fiercely, tenderly — seems to sing in the voice of Mother Earth herself". The band also unveiled an upcoming album entitled My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, featuring an image of Marsha P. Johnson by Alvin Baltrop on the cover, to be released by Rough Trade and Secretly Canadian on July 7, 2023. Louder Than War wrote that the album "touch[es] on elements of American soul, British folk and experimental music." Music videos followed for "Sliver of Ice", "Why Am I Alive Now?" (directed by Hunter Schafer), and "Scapegoat", directed by Sara Hegarty. The album was chosen as No. 1 Album of 2023 by The New Yorker. Anohni and the Johnsons toured Europe and North America in 2024. Bob Gendron of the Chicago Tribune wrote "Anohni and the Johnsons deliver on promise with ‘It’s Time to Feel What’s Really Happening’...The timing of Anohni's declarations couldn't be more necessary. It represented the unvarnished truth. Performing their first local show in more than 15 years, the transgender singer and her group delivered nothing but sheer emotion during one of the most courageous, vital and provocative concerts to grace a Chicago stage in recent memory." In November 2024, Anohni presented 2 concerts of songs by Lou Reed, her friend and mentor. The Guardian described the event as " a uniquely gifted interpreter pay[ing] homage to mentor Lou Reed... she's evidently in her element, taking risks with the song's melody and phrasing that justify the gig's appearance as part of the London jazz festival: you're very aware of an artist pushing at the boundaries and structure of a song on the spot...And sometimes, her reinterpretations seem faintly miraculous. Anohni is every bit as gifted an interpreter as you might imagine, and in Reed's oeuvre, she's found a perfect vehicle." In 2025 Anohni presented a new work "Mourning the Great Barrier Reef" at the Sydney opera house. Describing the project as seeking to create a “ceremony fit for the purpose of grieving a loss of such monumental scale,” she spent several weeks in May filming the declining condition of the reef from the research station on Lizard Island and interviewing experts in the field of marine biology on their sense of the GBR's condition and future prospects. The work was described in The Australian as "a somber meditation on ecological collapse, despair and complicity." In the months that followed Anohni presented the films throughout Europe, including Primavera Sound and Glastonbury, which Mojo declared to be "One of the most extraordinary performances Worthy Farm has ever witnessed." The concert was accompanied by large scale projections of the Great Barrier Reef in states of decay and abundance. “It is like when someone’s dying, sometimes they show the gold of the soul,” Anohni says. “They throw their life force into a final expression. That’s what coral bleaching is … she’s saying goodbye.” Of the concerts, The Guardian stated "Her ability to intertwine personal emotions with broader ecological concerns is what makes her work so compelling. She doesn’t simply present facts and statistics; rather, she invites listeners to connect with the emotional impact of environmental loss. The music becomes a shared lament, a communal acknowledgment of the profound and irreversible changes occurring on our planet."

Anohni occasionally collaborates with other musicians. In 2003, she began working with Lou Reed as a supporting vocalist on the Animal Serenade tour and performed on a number of tracks on Reed's album The Raven. She sang backup (with Sharon Jones and a children's choir) in Lou Reed's first full performance of his album Berlin at St Ann's Warehouse in New York in December 2006 and at The State Theatre in Sydney, Australia in January 2007. Anohni sang "If It Be Your Will" as a part of Hal Willner's Came So Far For Beauty concerts at the Sydney Opera House in 2005; this performance was later featured in the film Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, a tribute to Leonard Cohen. In 2006, she collaborated with Icelandic musician Björk in recording sessions in Jamaica and Iceland. The songs, "The Dull Flame of Desire" and "My Juvenile", were featured on her 2007 album Volta. The two also dueted on the songs at several of Björk's concerts, including London, Reykjavík and New York. In 2015, Anohni collaborated with Björk on Vulnicuras "Atom Dance". Also in 2006 she co-produced Songs from the Coalmine Canary by Little Annie, also playing piano, singing backup vocals, and co-writing several songs on the album. The song "Strangelove", co-written by Anohni and Little Annie, was used as the soundtrack for Levi's "Dangerous Liaisons" advertising campaign in 2007, garnering several awards, including the Cannes Lions – International Advertising Festival, 2007 (Bronze Lion) for "Best Use of Music". In 2008, Anohni was featured on five tracks from the self-titled disco album Hercules and Love Affair, most notably on "Blind", which was voted best track of 2008 by Pitchfork Media and ranked at number 2 on the "10 Best Singles of 2008" list by American magazine Entertainment Weekly. Anohni worked with Bernard Butler on some acoustic sessions for the radio station XFM. In June 2009, she appeared live with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band at Ornette Coleman's Meltdown festival at the Royal Festival Hall, singing Ono's "Toyboat". In the same year, she collaborated with Bryce Dessner on the Bob Dylan song "I Was Young When I Left Home" for the AIDS benefit album Dark Was the Night, produced by the Red Hot Organization. On March 6, 2013, Anohhi and the Johnsons performed Candy Says with Lou Reed at his last performance before his death in Paris, at the Salle Pleyel, a classical-music concert hall. In response to his death later that year she put out a statement on Facebook stating, "Lou was like a father to me. I have never felt so perceived and loved for who I actually am by a man than by Lou Reed. He fought tirelessly for me to have a place in the daylight culture. My career would never have taken off without Lou’s tremendous influence." The song "Sliver of Ice" off the album My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross was inspired by Reed. "He was a hardcore kind of guy and these moments were transforming the way he was seeing things. I wrote ‘Sliver of Ice,’ remembering those words of his.” On 2 September 2013, she performed at the Verona Arena with the Italian musician and songwriter Franco Battiato. The concert was made into the live album Del suo veloce volo, released that November by Universal. In 2017, Anohni appeared on Cocorosie's politically charged single "Smoke 'em Out" with Big Freedia, Cakes da Killa and others. In June 2022, Anohni appeared on Hercules and Love Affair's album In Amber. She took the lead on six tracks including the singles "Poisonous Storytelling", and "One". She co-composed six songs present on the record and also collaborated with drummer Budgie of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Creatures.

• Illustration — Anohni in Lillehammer, Norway (2007) Anohni is transgender and uses the pronouns she/her. In 2005, 11 years before she publicly changed her pronouns, Anohni said in an interview with Magnet Magazine "I prefer [the transgender] label to 'gay' (...) Listen, I believe that we all contain a family within us: a mother, a father, a son, a daughter. As far as how it affects my music, I think it's the same as in the case of being an immigrant. When you are outside the norm, it tends to make you more introspective." The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that "Anohni, 44, (was) now openly transgender", mistaking her change in name and pronoun as her first public statement of trans-identification. Six years earlier, on Sweden's Face Culture interview series in 2008, Anohni said: In an interview with Flavorwire in November 2014, she stated, "My closest friends and family use feminine pronouns for me. I have not mandated the press [to] do one thing or another... In my personal life I prefer 'she'. I think words are important. To call a person by their chosen gender is to honor their spirit, their life and contribution. 'He' is an invisible pronoun for me; it negates me." In 2016, the artist announced that she was changing her name to Anohni and elaborated on her views of being transgender to The Guardian: "The trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it’s one of nature’s best ideas. What an incredible impulse, that compels a five-year-old child to tell its parents it isn’t what they think it is. Given just a tiny bit of oxygen, those children can flourish and be such a gift. They give other people license to explore themselves more deeply, allowing the colours in their own psyche to flourish."

• Hopelessness (2016) • Paradise EP (2017)

• Antony and the Johnsons (2000) • I Am a Bird Now (2005) • The Crying Light (2009) • Swanlights (2010) • My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross (2023)

ANOHNI was recorded at birth as Antony Hegarty. He also worked under the names Anohni and Fiona Blue. The authorities additionally record the headings Antony, Antony Hegarty, Anohni Hegarty, Antony P. Hegarty and Precious Liar. His recorded language was English.