Rena Anakwe^CA/US

Rena Anakwe is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, poet, and healer whose practice incorporates sound, visuals, and scent to explore the places where traditional healing practices, spirituality, and performance can connect and fracture. At the core of her work is a deeper inquiry: reconnecting to nature can help us understand and mend these fractures, not only within ourselves but in relation to one another.

Based in Brooklyn, by way of Nigeria and Canada, she is a NEW INC Year 12 Incubator 2025-2026 cohort member in the Extended Realities Track, where she is building SENSORHEUM, an online platform connecting people to healing experiences both in person and online.

Her practice has been recognized and supported by some of the most significant institutions in contemporary art. She is a 2025 Henry Hewes Design Awardee for her Sound Design on Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers at TFANA, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts / New York Foundation for the Arts (NYSCA/NYFA) Artist Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, and a 2024 artist-in-residence in The Kitchen’s Dance and Process program. She has also been a 2023-2024 Lincoln Center Social Sculpture Cohort artist, a 2021-2022 MacDowell Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, and a 2022 Jack Nusbaum Artist-in-Residence at The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

Under the moniker ‘A Space for Sound’, Anakwe has released albums through label and collective PTP and RVNG Intl. She is a resident of the deep listening series, Planetarium, co-founded by Justin Carter & Eamon Harkin.