U.K.-born, California-raised
Antony Hegarty felt like the consummate outsider until coming face to face with the image of
Boy George on the cover of
Culture Club's 1982 debut album,
Kissing to Be Clever. Eight years later,
Hegarty relocated to New York City and found a world more accepting of avant-garde sensibilities and sexual ambiguity. An early incarnation was the cabaret ensemble Blacklips, modeled after Blue Velvet-era
Isabella Rossellini and the drag queen who graced the cover of
Soft Cell's 1982 single "Torch."
Hegarty formed
Antony and the Johnsons in 1998, and the band released its self-titled debut on
David Tibet's Durtro label in 2000, followed by an appearance on the
Lou Reed albums
The Raven and
Animal Serenade, plus a tour with
Reed throughout 2003. (
Hegarty also appeared in the 2000
Steve Buscemi film Animal Factory as an androgynous convict.)
Antony and the Johnsons released a series of EPs in 2004, followed by the band's second full-length, the Mercury Prize-winning
I Am a Bird Now, in February of 2005.
Antony spent the next two years on the road, as well as appearing on
Björk's
Volta and in the
Leonard Cohen documentary I'm Your Man before returning to the studio for the 2008 EP
Another World, which preceded 2009's full-length
The Crying Light.
Antony and the Johnsons' fourth studio album,
Swanlights, arrived the following year. In 2011, the album's publisher, Abrams, issued a companion edition of
Swanlights collected in book form, with
Antony's paintings, drawings, photography, collages, song lyrics, and writings. In 2012, the band released
Cut the World, a symphonic retrospective arranged and performed in collaboration with
the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. It featured 11 tracks from their catalog and the title cut, a new song written for Robert Wilson's stage production The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. In 2006,
Hegarty collaborated with video artist Charles Atlas on a performance piece called Turning, which combined a live performance by
Antony and the Johnsons with video projections created by Atlas featuring women who had struggled with self-image and sexual identity in their lives. Atlas later made a documentary about the show, simply titled
Turning, and in 2014 the film's soundtrack album was released in tandem with a DVD edition of the film. In 2015,
Antony announced the impending release of a new project with
Hudson Mohawke and
Oneohtrix Point Never. The resulting Hopelessness, a dark, experimental electronic piece that the she released under the moniker
Anohni, was issued in 2016. That same year
Antony received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, with
J. Ralph, for "Manta Ray," which appeared in the 2015 documentary film Racing Extinction. ~ James Christopher Monger