Trinity Anthony is a junior art history student and a Brock Scholar in the UTC Honors College. Photo by Angela Foster.
As a middle schooler, Trinity Anthony was in the bottom 1% for cognitive function among children her age.
She had suffered a traumatic brain injury after collapsing from vertigo and falling down a flight of steps at school.
“I hit 10 stairs, the floor and then the metal door,” said Anthony, who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. “Doctors told me it was weird because my bones weren’t broken, my jaw wasn’t broken and I had no fractures in my skull. They said they’dseen people fall down one stair and have worse injuries.”
Though she did not suffer from any broken bones, Anthony developed post-concussion syndrome that affected her memory, balance and ability to process information.
Today, she is a Brock Scholar in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Honors College. The junior is also an art history major and a student worker in the UTC Library’s Honors Specialist program.
Anthony has come a long way, but after missing a significant stretch of school and having to relearn basic comprehension skills, it took years of rehabilitation.
It began with 15-minute “doodle” sessions.
“After everything happened, I started doodling again because I had nothing else to do,” she said. “I couldn’t read, watch TV, listen to music, go outside. So, I’d doodle for 15 minutes.”
Her doctors limited her to 15 minutes of focus at a time before symptoms like headaches and dizziness returned. Those short sessions became a quiet way to track her progress.
“As I started to recover, I just did that more and more,” she said. “It would kind of center me.”
After months of therapy and homebound instruction, she gradually returned to the classroom.
“It was a process,” she said. “It was just weird to experience this so young and to not know what’s happening. I had appointments three times a week for different therapies to remember things and regain my balance.”
By the time she reached high school, Anthony was determined to improve. After recording a few B’s and C’s, she wanted to become a stronger student.
“I just knew I could do better,” she said, explaining that she would spend hours studying after school. “I would just read and read and read and reread and then practice, and then read, and then watch videos, and then read and practice. An assignmentwould take me four or five hours while my friends would get it done in an hour.”
Those long nights paid off. By her senior year, she was taking multiple advanced placement courses, including AP Art.
Trinity Anthony’s self-portrait was created as part of her AP Art portfolio inspired by Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Completed between 2019 and 2022, the piece symbolizes the life changes she experienced during that period. It was made on raw canvas with mixed media paper, using watercolor, Copic markers, colored pencil, charcoal, gouache and graphite.
Her art, which began as an escape during her recovery, had become a genuine passion. By the time Anthony reached the eighth grade, her art teacher submitted one of her pieces to a local museum—and it was accepted.
“That’s when it hit me that I was actually good at this,” Anthony said.
She began painting, experimenting with different media and entering art classes whenever possible.
“When I came back to school, art was just my favorite thing,” she said. “It was basically the only thing I was excelling in when I was having a hard time in other classes.”
That passion stayed with her through high school and into college. At UTC, Anthony channels the same discipline she had with her schoolwork into her studies of art history.
“With art history, I look at art as evidence of people throughout time,” she said. “Art can be political, emotional. It can be a time capsule of what was happening in the world.”
Her recent research trip to Germany with UTC Professor John Swanson deepened that perspective. At the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp site, she studied artwork created by prisoners during World War II. The pieces were often made insecret and smuggled out.
“[Researchers] were focusing on connecting testimony to the artwork,” Anthony said. “Not everyone can read—some of it’s in French, some of it’s German, some of it’s in English—but everyone can look at an art piece and kind of understand what it means.”
Her passion for history extends to her work in the UTC Library’s Honors Specialist program. There, she helped research and digitize materials from United Hosiery Mills, a Chattanooga textile company that operated for nearly a century.
That project is being guided by Carolyn Runyon, director of Special Collections; Molly Copeland, the library’s manuscripts archivist; and Dr. Lisa Piazza, executive director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavor (URaCE).
For Anthony, connecting the threads between art and storytelling is personal. She has looked back on her own “art history,” from the 15-minute doodles that marked her recovery to sketches of face masks she drew during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She credits part of her growth to the injury.
“I don’t think I would be where I am without the concussion,” she said. “It taught me what it’s like to lose everything and rebuild from the bottom. I feel so much more appreciative—not just for making good grades, but because I know what it’slike not to understand and to be left behind.”
Paint studies by Trinity Anthony are displayed at her 2022 solo art show. Created when she was 17, the monochromatic portraits were painted directly with acrylic in about 50 minutes each.
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Art pieces by Trinity Anthony
