Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Shana M. griffin

Shana M. griffin

New Orleans, Louisiana

Four glass containers with glass lids are lined up against a white wall in this piece titled SOIL Jars. Labels in front of the two middle jars read, “St. Joseph Plantation, Vacherie, LA” and “Burnt Wood Remains from Point Houmas Plantation,” though the location on this second label is obscured by a stack of booklets. The visible part of the label on the leftmost jar reads “of De Bore Plantation, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.”

SOIL Jars

2025

This black and white photo print, In Conversation from the SOIL series, juxtaposes a close up view of rocky dirt, rocks, and grass against a single-story wood house with a deep overhang over two empty doorways.

In Conversation, SOIL Series

2025

Six busts that make up [Und], Self Emancipation & Fugitivity are created with white plaster and fabric over identical head forms. All six have head wrappings that range from simple cloths tied at the nape of the neck to twisted, turban-like shapes. The bases of each bust are square or round, low or tall.

[Und], Self Emancipation & Fugitivity

2024 - 2025

This black and white photo print, Und, Evergreen Plantation, focuses closely on a cleft in rocky soil. The horizon is high so the grasses growing alongside the crevice reach off the top of the composition.

Und, Evergreen Plantation

2023

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Shana M. griffin

Black and white photograph of Shana M. griffin shows the artist sitting outside and leaning slightly back on her hands. Shana has long braids and wears dark clothing.
Photo by Jeremy Tauriac

Shana M. griffin is a US-based feminist activist, independent researcher, sociologist, artist, and geographer with an interdisciplinary feminist spatial practice. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning and within movements challenging displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. Much of her work attends 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, housing discrimination, and climate change. Shana is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and art to address the intersecting forms of violence and subjectivity Black women experience. She is also the creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia feminist and public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, and containment.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ My work engages history and memory as sites of resistance, rupture, and protest. I’m currently exploring different forms of Black visuality concerning displacement, feminist spatial imaginaries, and counter narratives of monumentality.”