*This story is brought to you by Most Incredible Studio founder Syreeta Gates as a part of our Because Of You: Legacy in Focus campaign honoring contemporary Black photographers*
She’s ensuring the nuance of Black life is never forgotten!
Andrea “Philly” Walls is a storyteller, and an architect of history, shaping how Black narratives are seen and remembered. As a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and archivist, she moves with intention, ensuring that the stories of Black life are seen, felt, and remembered. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Walls is committed to pushing back against narratives that define Blackness through trauma. Instead, she amplifies joy, resilience, and the beauty found in the everyday.
Her lens is sharp, but her vision is even sharper. “I want the joyful side to be, at the very least, an equal part of what people think they know,” Walls says.
Walls is the founder and creative director of the Museum of Black Joy, a digital archive born from urgency. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, she felt the weight of witnessing Black death in slow motion, day after day, on every screen. Rather than accept a reality where those images defined the collective experience, she responded with her art.
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“I just hit the streets, took my knowledge of Black culture and Philadelphia culture, and began collecting non-traumatic images, just as a gift to the atmosphere,” she explains. “Because I had started to doubt my own reality based on the fact that when I opened my phone to check the weather, I was watching somebody be murdered in slow motion against my own will.”
This offering became a movement. Through photography, digital archives, and community storytelling, the Museum of Black Joy serves as both resistance and refuge—an assertion that joy is a birthright in all its forms.
Walls’ work extends beyond the streets of Philadelphia. Lately, her lens has turned south, exploring the land that once bore the weight of forced labor but remains rich with ancestral wisdom. Standing in a cotton field, she felt a shift.
“This cotton isn’t evil. I’m dressed in cotton. It’s not the land. It’s not the plants. It’s not the rice. Rice feeds people. It’s the exploitation that’s evil,” she reflects.
This realization fuels her ongoing project, a photographic journey through landscapes that hold wounds and healing. She seeks to reclaim the narrative, honoring the knowledge Black people carried across oceans—their agriculture, medicine, and survival expertise. Her work speaks to the resilience of those who came before and the reclamation of spaces that were never meant to be stolen.
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For Walls, storytelling is an act of engagement—a call to witness, create, and shape our collective memory. As an educator, she witnessed how hands-on creativity reconnects people to themselves. Whether through collage, photography, or building, she sees play as a way back to something essential.
“Joy can emerge and coexist with and from every human experience,” she says. “It’s a practice, like yoga. You have to strengthen the joy muscles to be able to live in joy.”
As Walls sees it, Joy is more than a feeling—a practice, a declaration of resilience, and an inheritance that must be claimed. And most importantly, it’s ours to claim.
Cover photo: Meet Andrea Walls, the Artist Preserving Black Stories Through Photography/Photo credit: Black Feminists Taught Me