If you're one the 12.7M (and counting) people who follow Anna Shumate on TikTok, then you know the 19-year-old better by her handle, annabananaxdddd. By the time she was 17, Anna was one of the most popular creators on the app (NBD, totally not dying of envy or anything) and that popularity, by the way, is very much deserved. Anna's content is a brilliant balance of dance clips, spot-on POVs, amazing lip syncs, and hilarious comedy shorts—basically everything that makes TikTok great.
And, if you've been thirsting for more intel about the creator behind that brilliant content, you've come to exactly the right place because we've rounded up the must-know facts for acing Intro to Annabananaxdddd (<--- not a real class, but should be).
She joined TikTok as a joke.
If Anna's TikTok origin story was a children's book, the moral would definitely be "follow your whims, kiddos" because that's exactly what TikTok was for her. She was literally just like, "Oh this will be funny," downloaded the app, and then became famous almost overnight. It's a modern fairytale.
"I had no plans when I joined TikTok," she explained in an interview with When I Make It to LA. "I started it as a joke just to see what would happen and then within a few weeks I was already at 20k."
This was in 2019. Today, that follower count is quickly creeping up on 13M.
She's from Michigan.
Anna is originally from Michigan and, in that WIMITLA interview, she said she lives "on an island in the Detroit River" (that island, in case you feel the overwhelming urge to Google Earth stalk her, is called Grosse Ile). By December 2020, she had officially relocated to Los Angeles, according to a Q&A she posted on YouTube.
She's repped and has spent time living in Talent Houses.
According to a profile on Influencer Marketing Hub, Anna is repped by Top Talent L.A. Management, which signed her following her meteoric rise to TikTok dominance. Considering she's still all over the Top Talent L.A. Management Instagram, it seems safe to assume she's still a client.
In October 2020, Top Talent revealed that Anna was one of four female influencers in the house, along with Rachel Brockman, Eva Cudmore, and Katie Pego. Anna and her housemates debuted the space in a TikTok video (duh) that also came with a merch launch because that's the hustle. (And, for the record, that hustle is paying off big time. Anna reportedly had 6.6M TikTok followers when Top Talent House launched, meaning she's almost doubled her follower count on the app since then.)
The honeymoon period in Top Talent House was short-lived, though. Less than a month after the big launch, reports circulated that the house was shutting down amid allegations that the house's manager, Nour Khodr, who was 21 at the time, was exploiting minors and engaging in grooming behavior.
Top Talent House then merged with Not a Content House and Anna reportedly stayed in the new merged group, which consisted of her, Eva, and Katie from Top Talent House, and Madi Monroe, Cynthia Parker, Lauren Kettering, Devyn Winkler, and Ava Tortorici from Not a Content House. (It's worth mentioning that the environment in NACH was also suspect, and several former members later spoke out about the toll living there took on their mental health and called out the management team for their role in the situation.)
She values friendship more than fame.
So, Talent Houses run by people other than the talent themselves clearly have a great potential to be problematic or even downright toxic, but connecting with other creators is apparently Anna's favorite thing about TikTok fame, so at least there's that?
"The best perk of this TikTok fame is that I have made so many friends and have gotten super close within such a short amount of time," she told WIGTLA.
In another aww-worthy moment from the same interview that showed off how important friendships are to her, Anna said if she could have any superpower, it would be teleportation, "so I would be able to teleport to my friends across the country."
She'd love to do a D'Amelio collab, duh.
When asked about who she'd most want to team up with for a TikTok collab, Anna chose Dixie D'Amelio, surprising no one. A professional TikTok star admitting that they dream of a D'Amelio TikTok collab is like when A-list actors admit they want to costar with Meryl Streep or famous musicians say they'd love to jam with The Beatles. When you're passionate about something creative, of course you want to work with the reigning Queen or King of that thing.
Anna said Dixie would be her top choice "because she's goofy and does whatever she wants and I think a video with her would be funny to make."
Her friends call her Boon.
Fun fact: Anna's friends don't call her Anna, they call her Boon. In her YouTube Q&A, Anna explained the origins of the nickname. The short version is this: During Anna's junior year of high school, a friend from the soccer team made a video in which she called her "banana" but pronounced it "boonana." This led to Boon Anna being split into two names and then Boon sticking as Anna's nickname.
Anna explains it better, obviously:
