Shana M. griffin

Shana M. griffin is feminist, independent researcher, activist, artist, and applied sociologist. Her work is rooted in black feminist thought, praxes, and organizing traditions. She engages in research, organizing projects, curatorial practices that attend to the lived experiences of the black Diaspora—centering the experiences of black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, carcerality, polluting environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination. Her activism and research explores critical issues involving the political economy of reproductive violence and policies of population control and surveillance, the decommodification of housing and the politics of urban development, histories of slavery and contemporary ways of being, carceral violence and criminalizing policies, and art and re-imagination to name a few. Shana serves on numerous boards and organizing collectives including Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, INCITE, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Gallery of the Streets, and PATIOS. She holds a Master’s of Arts in Sociology and two Bachelors of Arts degrees in History and Sociology. Aside from her involvement on boards and in organizing collectives, Shana is the co-producer and lead-researcher of Sooner of Later, Somebody's Gonna Fight Back, a documentary and multimedia project on the Louisiana State Chapter of the Black Panther Party; creator of DISPLACED, an interactive timeline chronicling urban development and displacement of black communities through the institutionalization of spatial residential segregation and discriminatory housing practice; and founder of Assemblage, a curated pop-up and online collection of books, t-shirts, vintage wares, textiles, and vinyl. She has curated and served as contributing artists to numerous projects including a recent installation of DISPLACED at the Joan Mitchell Center’s 2017 Town Hall on Art, Gentrification and Displacement curated with artist Sharita Towne; a contributing artist to the visual black opera ECOHYBRIDITY: Love Song for Nola, a collaborative project of Gallery of the Street, directed by artists and activist kai lumumba barrow for the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katina; curator of barrow’s solo exhibit ECOHYBRIDITY at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2015; curator of DISRUPT the STATE, a multimedia exploration of creative disruptions and imaginative responses to racialize gender-based violence and carceral practices at the Color of Violence 4 conference in Chicago in 2015; and contributing artist to the multimedia art installation Sacred Space, featuring the timeline DISPLACED and the visual memories of what’s left behind hen families are displaced, at public art exhibition Prospect P.3+ site ExhibitBE in New Orleans.