Biographie-Tristian Griffin

I began developing these approaches when I founded Tristian Griffin Dance Company in 2019 in Kansas City, MO. While my work focuses on the Black experience, it also addresses the complexities of the human condition, raising probing questions about how we move toward healing. These spaces serve as spiritual preparation for engaging in challenging dialogues about change. Together, we interact with the body of work, uncover new insights, and bring these discoveries to life through multidisciplinary productions that empower, represent, and amplify the voices of the unheard, unseen, and unrepresented.
Summary of work:
“Echoes of Blood, Bone, Water, & Earth” is a hybrid ethnographic and choreographic project that reimagines Black geography through embodied engagement with key historical sites in Cotonou, Benin. Anchored in decolonial inquiry and ancestral remembrance, the work engages with charged landmarks—including the Institut Français du Bénin, Porte du Non-Retour, and Mémorial de Zoungbodji—that carry the weight of diasporic rupture, cultural resilience, and spiritual continuity.
This research investigates how Black identity, resistance, and intergenerational trauma are inscribed in geography, cultural heritage sites, and the Black body itself. In collaboration with local historians, community elders, and artists from Centre Chorégraphique de Cotonou’s Multicorps, the project activates a living archive—one that transcends colonial narratives and reclaims the embodied knowledge embedded in place and flesh.
Guided by the elemental forces of Blood, Bone, Water, and Earth, the choreographic process invokes cosmological, ecological, and somatic frameworks to trace the transmission of ancestral memory across body and landscape. These elements become metaphoric and material languages through which to navigate the entangled histories of dispossession, survival, and transcendence that shape the Black diasporic experience.
By centering the Black body as both a vessel and witness of history, Echoes articulates a methodology of reclamation—where lost cultural treasures are not only objects, but also gestures, movements, rituals, and spatial relationships. This work contributes to evolving discourses in Black geography, phenomenology, and cultural memory, offering a diasporic and decolonial vision of how history lives in the body, moves across land, and endures through generational transmission.