Anthony N. Johnson, aka Mtuaswa, Mississippi born and Chicago bred is an energetic and engaging speaker, writer, poet, producer, soldier, teacher, diviner and father. Mtuaswa (a Kiswahili name meaning; natural man), is a graduate of the Indigenous African Spiritual Technologies training with Malidoma Some, whom he met and has worked with since 1995.
Mtuaswa says: I do not know what I am doing, I do not do Divinations, they do me. During these readings we open ourselves up to listening to the other world and sharing what comes up based upon a cosmology of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. I am not a Shaman, or a Priest. I consider myself A Reminder, that is, a conduit that reminds us all of our unique and innate connection to Spirit.
To quote one of my poems; I am too sinister to be a minister, too full of yeast to be a priest and I ate too much ham to be an Imam, too frail to find the Holy Grail and I did not go to school long enough to called a Doc, Ah, but sometimes I can feel it, that space between the Tic... and the Toc....
Anthony has worked primarily as a Television and Film Producer producing for the likes of IBM, Motorola, Greenpeace, the Levis 501 Jeans and Bud-Lite Give-me-a-Light series of television spots. It was during that time that he became one of the countrys leading producers of 3-D animation. The New York International recognized his Producer skills for Computer Animation with a Silver Medal.
In 1990 he moved from Chicago to Washington DC; serving as post-production project manager for the ABC-News/Ted Koppel Peabody Award winning program; Tragedy at Tianamen Square and six other nationally televised specials. He later served as director of production/operations for Black Entertainment Television (BET), managing the production of all cable programming.
It was in 1994 that Anthony began his independent career. Producer credits include: a national campaign for the National Fair Housing Alliance, the World Bank’s Technology and the Third World; The Information Age for the Smithsonian Institution and the Communities in Crisis documentary for Greenpeace, and The 1999 From Whence we Came Awards, featuring Nancy Wilson and the OJays, airing to over fifty-million homes. Anthony has also written articles for Millimeter, Videography and Screen magazines.
AJ is a Certified Presenter and Workshop Facilitator on race, class and sex through the Mankind Project, an International organization dedicated to initiating men into the sacred masculine.
Anthony is also the founder of Multikulti an organization dedicated to open dialogue between races and cultures, now going into its seventh year.
He is currently a feature film writer/producer overseeing the film based upon the autobiography, Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Some, the story that Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker so aptly calls: the shimmering, missing piece of the story of the earth.
Now based in Hattiesburg,MS. Mtuaswa offers Kulcha and Multikulti workshops and can often be seen performing his one-man show entitled Spirit Talk, a two-hour blend of original poetry and inspirational content.
He holds a MA in Human Learning and Development and is a former United States Army Captain.