Shana griffin
Shana M. griffin is a New Orleans-based feminist activist, independent researcher, sociologist, abolitionist, geographer, and artist. She is the 2024-25 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow.
Shana’s practice is interdisciplinary, research based, and decolonial—attending to the particular experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender based violence.
She is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and socially engaged art, and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia public history project tracing the geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, and containment in New Orleans and the surrounding region. She also founded Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans. Her project SOIL interrogates the carceral spaces of what is left behind in and on the grounds of former and current sugarcane plantations along the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana.
Shana has received several awards, including a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. She holds a master of arts in sociology, a bachelor of arts in history, and a bachelor of arts in sociology.