Hasani's profile
Hasani Claxton is a visual artist, author, and educator from St. Kitts, West Indies. His love of art began in the first grade, but he did not initially pursue an art career. He studied Business at Morehouse College (1999) and Law at Columbia University (2003). While working as an attorney in New York, he began taking evening classes at the School of Visual Arts. In 2005, he decided to pursue his passion full time and enrolled in Academy of Art University in San Francisco, receiving a BFA in Illustration in 2009 and an MFA in Studio Art from Towson University in 2017. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Coppin State University.
His artwork has been exhibited throughout the US, as well as in the UK and the Caribbean, including the National Gallery of Jamaica. His art has appeared in Spectrum: Fantastic Art, Creative Quarterly, Caribe Art Magazine and Afropunk.com. He was a semifinalist for the Trawick Art Prize in 2017 and the Sondheim Art Prize in 2020. He was selected for the first cohort of the Brown Bookshelf-Highlights Foundation: Amplify Black Stories program in 2021 and received an Individual Artist Award in Literary Arts from the MD State Arts Council in 2022 and the Rubys Artist Microgrant in 2024 from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
