Big Fine Anderson is a Forest Park–based fire and flow artist whose work lives at the intersection of movement, ritual, and embodied storytelling. She has lived in Forest Park for the past seven years, and it is also deeply rooted in her childhood. Through fire, flow arts, and somatic movement, she creates performance experiences that honor the body as both instrument and archive—exploring presence, power, and transformation as living art forms.
She was drawn to the arts through the body first—through movement, rhythm, and the need to express what words could not hold. As a Black woman, fire and flow became a way for her to reconnect with ancestral memory, resilience, and personal sovereignty. Growing up in the Forest Park, Maywood, and River Forest area and graduating from Trinity High School in River Forest, she brings to her work a lived experience, a sense of community, and the belief that art is not separate from life—it is how we remember ourselves and one another.
Big Fine is an active part of the Chicago Full Moon Jam community and regularly hosts fire safety workshops and beginner flow workshops. To her knowledge, she is the first Black female powder fire-breather and powder fire-breathing instructor currently practicing, and her work is rooted in education, safety, and expanding representation within the fire arts.
Photo credit: @opticsbyced.ll (IG)