Alexander Catanzarite

Alexander Catanzarite is an exploration and research-based artist, illustrator, sound designer, and poet living on Tongva land [Los Angeles, CA]. Through visual, written, and sonic worldbuilding they capture the diversity and pay homage to Black and indigenous bodies, lands, cultures, and spirits. They received their Bachelor of Arts from California State University Los Angeles where they focused on Pan African Studies and Fine Arts.

Their work is driven by themes of spiritual and physical connections, body movement, sexuality, community, and rebirth. The soundscapes they create are rooted in imagining and building vibrant and harmonious worlds through audio-visual storytelling. Catanzarite creates portals and vibrations; using history as a guide and planting seeds of timeless visions that influence the eternal present moment we exist in. Catanzarite uses food, music, poetry, sexuality, and radical acts of pleasure as fuel for art and manifestations of a reality that pushes back against the dominant and normalized culture of violence and apathy. They question and search for how we can fulfill our ability to feel, shift, change, and choose. How do we find kinship with each other; and deepen and pour into ourselves and the land we inhabit?

Catanzarite comes from a queer and Pan African worldview; recognizing how everything in the universe is connected to a single evershifting source, a web of intersecting memories and experiences that build off of, react to, and feed into one another.