Shana M. griffin
Shana M. griffin is a feminist activist, researcher, applied sociologist, artist, geographer, abolitionist, and mother. Her practice is interdisciplinary and undisciplinary, centering historic inquiry rooted in black feminist thought, spatial imaginaries, and organizing traditions. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, land-use planning, and socially engaged art and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, and gender-based violence.
Shana engages in research, organizing projects, and art practices that attend to the lived experiences of the black Diaspora—centering the particular experiences of black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination. Shana is the Interim Executive Director of Antenna, a multidisciplinary visual and literary arts organization; founder of PUNCTUATE, a recently established feminist research, art, and activist initiative foregrounding the embodied aesthetics and practices of black feminist epistemological traditions to address the intersecting forms of everyday violence and subjectivity black women, their families, and communities experience; creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia feminist and public history project that chronicles the institutionalization of spatial residential segregation through the violence of racial slavery and displacement in New Orleans, and co-founder of Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans. Shana is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee and a Junebug Productions, 2020-2021 John O’Neal Cultural Arts Fellow. She’s a 2020-2021 Visual Artist in Resident at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans presenting studio work as part of SOLOS: Exhibitions and New Work Showcases by CAC Artists-in-Residence, featuring DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability of the DISPLACED Project. Shana holds a Master’s of Arts in Sociology and two Bachelors of Arts degrees in History and Sociology. You can learn more about Shana’s work at www.shanamgriffin.com.
