Anna Cole

Artistic Director

Anna moved to New York City after participating in Occupy Wall Street as an organizer and visual artist. For almost a decade, she built a career there as an actress, designer, and teacher. Having a creative, vibrant life in New York City had been her dream since childhood, and overnight that dream became a nightmare. The last day that she worked on a costume fitting in February 2020, she said that the lockdowns currently happening in China couldn’t happen in the US “because people here would riot in the streets”. Only days later, NYC closed down and she lost everything she had in the city– her jobs, social life, apartment, boyfriend– and something indescribable but even more important than those things.

New York had represented freedom of expression and thought in years past; it had represented a place where anything was possible for people who had vision and ambition, and now she could no longer speak or act freely there. Anna’s background in Occupy Wall Street had taught her to always question everything, but it was shocking to feel attacked by old friends who could not accept her skepticism towards the lockdowns that had resulted in substance abuse, suicides, violence, societal division, profound isolation, and the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.

She conceived of the idea for Out of Lockstep in January 2022 during the process of packing to move to South Dakota for freedom and reflecting on everything that had led up to that decision.

John Healy

Executive Producer

As an outspoken critic of lockdowns since March 2020, John has long been immersed in the wide variety of narratives, statistics, and points of view on the pandemic around the world. His degree in Biological Engineering from MIT and lifelong passion for science made him well-positioned to evaluate scientific studies as they were released and separate the promising ones from the noise. John has also founded and worked on several early-stage technology startups, developing expertise around software development, technical project management, user experience, and marketing. He is honored to bring these skills to the Out of Lockstep project.

Ander Smith

Graphic Designer

Ander Smith is one of the few people on the entire planet who truly never experienced the lockdowns (as opposed to people who did experience them but claim that nothing happened).

Born and raised in rural South Dakota, she grew up on a farm and was home schooled. Absolutely nothing about her life changed in 2020, due to the combination of South Dakota’s uniquely lax restrictions and the nature of living in a small town surrounded by extended family.

Ander Smith has two goals in life: become a graphic designer, and go on adventures. She’s currently partaking in four different “Dungeons and Dragons” campaigns to fulfill the desire for adventure, and attending Southeast Technical Institute to learn about Digital Media.

During a 10 minute break from a class on how to use Adobe Illustrator, Anna casually mentioned that she had a prime location to display “a subversive art show at the Libertarian version of Burning Man in New Hampshire this summer” and asked Ander if she wanted to go too like it was no big deal to drive halfway across the country (because Anna is an extrovert and that’s just how she rolls). Without really processing the idea fully, Ander enthusiastically said she wanted to go. She also offered to help turn some of the hand-drawn illustrations into digital vectors, which bought Anna enough time to maintain the last lingering threads of her sanity while preparing to debut “Out of Lockstep” at the festival.

Ander’s perception of lockdowns is filtered entirely through the lens of Anna and John making dark jokes about their PTSD from that time period, because she seriously didn’t see anything like that happen around her. It’s like she’s interacting with refugees from the Twilight Zone. She’s not involved because she was impacted by lockdowns but because “it sounded like fun to get involved in this.”