Anna U Davis is a Swedish American visual artist born in Lund, Sweden, and based in Washington, DC since 1998. For nearly three decades, Davis has developed a distinctive visual language centered on her gray-toned Frocasian figures. Working across painting, drawing, hand-cut paper collage, textiles, and wall-based sculpture, she examines how race, gender, appearance, relationships, and circumstance shape the ways people read one another.

Davis earned a B.A. in Studio Art (Painting), summa cum laude, from the University of the District of Columbia in 2002. She is a two-time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, awarded in 2015 and 2021, and has received sustained fellowship and project support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Selected solo exhibitions include And Still We Rise at IA&A at Hillyer in Washington, DC; Road to Recovery at Brentwood Arts Exchange; Reality Check at Davis Gallery in Copenhagen, IA&A at Hillyer, and the Swedish American Museum in Chicago; Witnesses at House of Sweden; and Damsels in Distress at Galerie Myrtis. Her work was included in the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019. In 2023, Davis participated in Art x Female Empowerment, a public program at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.

Davis will be an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York from December 2026 through May 2027. Her work is held in the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Collection, and the private collection of Dorothy Lichtenstein.

Her work has been reviewed or featured in The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, BmoreArt, Contemporary Lynx, and Feminist Studies, which published a feature essay on her work in 2020.