Hi, I’m Anya Dillard.

I’m a 22-year-old community organizer, social entrepreneur, multimedia storyteller, and model from New Jersey. I’m best known for my expertise in 3 main areas:

  • Advocacy

  • Social Entrepreneurship

  • Radical Creativity & Media Arts

I have amassed my expertise through a combination of these experiences. They have all informed the leader that I am today, and the leader I’m becoming.

Short Biography

Anya Dillard is an award-winning organizer, social entrepreneur, and multimedia storyteller who’s been disrupting narratives since 2008. She is the founder of The Next Gen Come Up – a grassroots 501(c)3 encouraging social entrepreneurship, and Jenevesque Media LLC – a multimedia production advancing the future of impact-driven storytelling through experimental nonfiction, narrative, and immersive projects.

Throughout her career, Anya has organized countless grassroots impact initiatives advocating for civil rights, climate justice, gender equality, and educational equity in the United States and abroad. She has also built a career as a creative change-agent who uses media to educate, empower, and mobilize people. 

Gracing stages at TEDx Harvard Square, Princeton University, Cornell University, and more, Anya’s traveled the nation speaking to young people about the importance of civic engagement and radical creativity. As a graduate of Rutgers University Newark’s honors college, former Academy of Motion Pictures’ Gold Rising Fellow, and Gucci Creative fellow, Anya’s creative impact work has earned her opportunities at award-winning companies like Monkeypaw Productions and features in Teen Vogue, MSNBC, CNN, Elle, and The Washington Post to name a few.

Long Biography

Anya Dillard is a 22-year-old community organizer, social entrepreneur, model, and multimedia storyteller. She is also the founder of The Next Gen Come Up – a 501(c)3 nonprofit that encourages young people to explore activism, pursue community service, and raise awareness through creative expression — and the CEO of Jenevesque Media LLC — a multimedia production house striving to amplify globally marginalized voices and utilize immersive media to eradicate implicit bias and foster cross-cultural understanding.

Throughout her career, Anya has specialized in using media to mobilize, educate, and empower communities worldwide. “I have always been fascinated by the ways media has been used to oppress and empower marginalized people throughout history,” she says. “I want to grow into a change agent who utilizes media as a conduit for their liberation.” She plans to focus her academic research on how immersive media technologies can be leveraged as tools for the eradication of implicit bias and to pursue a master’s degree in Production.

Directing numerous short films across both non-fiction and fiction forms, Anya centers themes of kinship, triple consciousness, patriotism, and Black femininity in her work. Her films take subversive and poetic approaches to stories whose socio-political weight might otherwise be diluted by traditional narrative conventions. She has worked under acclaimed filmmakers such as Maxi Cohen (post-production and administrative intern), Jordan Peele (impact intern at Monkeypaw Productions), and Roger Williams (production and archival intern at One Story Up Productions). A recent graduate of The Academy of Motion Pictures’ Gold Rising Fellowship, Anya has also served as an assistant director, public relations coordinator, cinematographer, and screenwriter on several student films, including A Letter to God (dir. Zayla Bryant), Crossroads (dir. Darion Cotton), and GO (dir. Dusan Brown, currently in post-production).

In her community, Anya is best known for helping to organize the largest civil rights protests in West Orange history (garnering an audience of over 3,000 people), co-organizing her town’s first-ever Juneteenth Celebration, contributing to her high school's first climate strike walkout, and being appointed as president of the first all-female all POC Student Council cabinet in her high school’s history.

While Anya’s career as an activist goes back half a decade, her journey as a woman of service goes back even further. When Anya was just 5 years old, she started her first charity initiative – an annual holiday gift-giving program for the long-term care pediatric division of Rutland Nursing Home at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. Since its creation, Anya’s Holiday Gift Giving Charity has raised tens of thousands of dollars to provide blankets, clothes, undergarments, toys, musical instruments, and more to children (ages newborn to 18) suffering from severe physical and neurological disabilities.

Today, Anya hosts and actively raises money for dozens of other mutual aid efforts, including the back-to-school supply and coat drives that she hosts annually for the children of Sierra House – a group home shelter in East Orange, NJ that caters to single mothers escaping homelessness and domestic violence. In addition to her work in communities across America, Anya has also contributed to countless efforts in regions all over the world, including West Africa and the Caribbean.

In 2023 alone, Anya partnered with global brands like UGG, Puma, and Savage X Fenty on media campaigns that helped to highlight the need for heightened mental health awareness in the fashion industry, set a new sustainability standard and human rights focus across the supply chain, and amplify the need for more positive black representation in the media and beauty industry. She also traveled to Florida with the Transformative Justice Coalition to participate in a 15-city-tour across the state of Florida, give away over 4000 banned books, register hundreds of community members to vote, and advocate against the erasure, hate, and discriminatory legislation being pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature. Lastly, she traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to assist the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation — an organization she’s worked closely with ever since she co-founded the Youth Never Let Up Coalition — in organizing the 68th Commemoration Weekend in memory of Emmett Louis Till. Anya is currently helping raise money to build the first-ever 3D-printed educational campus in Madagascar, in partnership with Thinking Huts and Have a Nice Day.

Throughout her high school career, she helped to organize countless protests demanding justice for victims of gun violence and school shootings, demanding changes to exclusionary dress code policies, and advocating for climate change awareness. During the fall of 2019, Anya created the “#MyRedStripe” – an annual social media image activism campaign geared towards raising awareness and money for period poverty and eradicating period shame in schools.

Following the massive Black Lives Matter protest she and her peers organized in 2020, Anya continued organizing Black Lives Matter rallies in partnership with other elected officials and town leaders, including former Congressional candidate Akil Khalfani, and West Orange’s first black town councilwoman, Tammy Williams. She also sat in on meetings with her town’s mayor and helped to edit ordinances pertaining to anti-bias training of law enforcement officials, racial discrimination in schools, and economic disparities between predominantly black/Latinx elementary schools and predominantly white elementary schools.

As a result of her many accomplishments and extensive advocacy work, Anya has been featured by countless networks and media publications, including The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Instagram, Red Table Talk, REVOLT TV, Elle, Seventeen, Afropunk, and Glamour Magazines. She was also honored as a part of McDonald’s Future 22 and Ulta Beauty’s Muse 100, receiving dozens of other social justice and community engagement awards, including the Conversationalist Human Rights Award, and the 2021 New Jersey Association of Student Councils’ Student Leader of the Year Award, to name a few. 

Anya graduated Magna Cum Laude from Rutgers University–Newark’s Honors College and Honors Living Learning Community, earning a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Journalism and Video Production and double minors in Political Science and Social Justice. She previously graduated with honors from West Orange High School, receiving dozens of leadership and community service awards, and earning certificates of completion from competitive programs like The Harvard Business School Summer in Venture Management Program, The Academy of Motion Pictures’ Gold Rising Fellowship, BLACK GIRLS ROCK’s (Black Girls Lead) Conference, Girls With Impact (powered by Harvard Business School), and The Young Diplomats Program at Hampton University.