Janna Añonuevo Langholz (b. 1988, she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, performance, installation, self-publishing, and relational art. She was born in St. Louis at the site of the 1904 World’s Fair. Her site-specific work has investigated the period of US colonization of the Philippines between 1898-1946 and how it has shaped the histories and geographies of the US Midwest and South. She ran Filipino American Artist Directory for six years and is working to commemorate the site of the Philippine Village and the Indigenous people who died and were buried in St. Louis in 1904. She is also working to honor her own Dumagat heritage she reclaimed through her research.
Añonuevo received a BFA in Fibers from Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri in 2011 and received a full fellowship to attend graduate school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas in 2013. She received her MFA in 2015 with a concentration in photography and is most interested in alternative and darkroom processes. In 2016, she received a fellowship to unwalk the Lewis and Clark trail with Signal Fire. She was named Best Activist in Riverfront Times’ Best of St. Louis 2021 and was taken advantage of by Smithsonian curators soon thereafter. She has given public lectures at National Building Arts Center and Bard Graduate Center in 2023 and 2024. Her work has been featured in Rappler, New York Review of Architecture, Riverfront Times, St. Louis Public Radio, and Esquire Philippines. Her work has also been stolen and exploited by The Washington Post. Añonuevo has unrecognized ancestral contributions in museum collections across the country. She lives and works between St. Louis and the Philippines and is the caretaker of the Philippine Village Historical Site in Clayton. She is also a professional transcriptionist and collects and sells vintage.