Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, sociologist, artist, geographer, and mother whose work engages history and memory as sites of resistance, rupture, and protest.
Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial—existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence.
She engages in decolonial practices that attend to the lived experiences of the Black Diaspora, centering on the particular experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change.
Shana is a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee and a Junebug Productions, 2020-2021 John O'Neal Cultural Arts Fellow. She is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist research, art, and activist initiative foregrounding the embodied aesthetics and practices of Black feminist organizing traditions to address the intersecting forms of everyday violence and subjectivity Black women experience; and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia feminist and public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, and containment through racial slavery and violent formation of New Orleans as a colonial enterprise and carceral landscape. Shana is also the co-founder of Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans, and co-produced Sooner or Later, Somebody’s Gonna Fight Back, a documentary and multimedia project on the Louisiana State Chapter of the Black Panther Party. To learn more about her work and practice, click here.