Amanzi Arnett Dowdy is a multidisciplinary artist based in Memphis, Tennessee, whose work centers the liberation and preservation of Black and queer histories in the U.S. South. They studied music composition at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis. Grounded in the African American experience, Amanzi’s classical compositions include concert-stage settings of Negro spirituals alongside contemporary works informed by Black American literature. They are currently a first-year MA student in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Amanzi’s composition The Creation: A Negro Sermon for Five Voices premiered at the African-American Lectionary Forum on Culture, Worship, and Preaching at the Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. The work draws inspiration from James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation” from God’s Trombones.
Their artistic development has been shaped by sustained engagement with place and community. While living in Brooklyn, New York, Amanzi deepened their interdisciplinary practice through collaboration with artists and cultural workers. Following a brief hiatus from music, they returned to performance, touring with Chorale Le Chateau in collaboration with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for the Abyssinian Mass tour, which traveled across sixteen cities in the eastern and southern United States.
After returning to Memphis by way of Los Angeles, Amanzi expanded their storytelling practice through screenwriting. They were awarded the Indie Memphis Screenwriting Fellowship, during which they completed the feature-length screenplay I’ll Fly Away. In collaboration with PRIZM Ensemble, Amanzi later presented Songs of Cabin and Field, a concert of original works for orchestra and local singers centered on Black American folk traditions, held at LeMoyne-Owen College in South Memphis.
Amanzi wrote and scored the short film Shine On: The Story of Tom Lee, produced by Last Bite Films, which premiered in 2025. Their writing has appeared in Mic.com, Cassius Life, BBC, and Minnesota Public Radio. Amanzi has served on panels for the Indie Memphis Black Creators Forum and the Center for Southern Literary Arts, and most recently as a keynote panelist for Hamline University’s Mahle Lecture Series. Across disciplines, their work foregrounds the interior lives of Black people in the American South.