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Davianna Griffin (pronounced Day – VEE – AH – nah) is a dancer, educator, and collaborator.  A surging international performing artist-scholar, Davianna’s research focuses on 21st-century Black womanhood and centers the voices, bodies, and ideas of the Black experience. As a queer creative, she collaborates with artists and questions how embodied practices can serve as a voice for those who are silenced. Her movement vocabulary is rooted in Africanist Aesthetics that inform her autoethnographic-embodied-ancestral memory practices. Davianna has presented her scholarly research at the Dance Studies Association, International Association of Blacks in Dance, and Collegium of African Diaspora Dance. She received her MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University.  

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As a choreographer, performer, and researcher, she has traveled nationally and internationally, including El Salvador, Brazil, where she taught classes and facilitated discussions with professional dancers at FUNCEB. Davianna has collaborated with Hybrid Arts Lab – Urban Arts Space, Virginia Arts Festival Rhythm Project, and Wexner Center for the Arts to share choreographic work and arts programming that resists the presentation of a monolithic voice but instead creates space for nuance within the Black voices centered in the projects. Griffin’s work has been featured in the Baltimore Black Choreographers Festival, Emerging Black Choreographers Incubator through Mojuba! Dance Collective, Neon Festival, and the Chadwick Arboretum. Davianna has created dance works, taught master classes, and served as a faculty member at institutions such as Slippery Rock University, Old Dominion University, East Carolina University, and the Governor’s School for the Arts. 

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She performed professionally with Todd Rosenlieb Dance and is currently a performing collaborator and co-founder of Thick Like Me, a non-profit collective. Thick Like Me focuses on the intersection of fat Black women in Dance to resist and dismantle the overlapping systemic injustices of patriarchy, racism, and fatphobia in the mind, body, and soul. The collective is rooted in Black feminist praxis that fully embraces academic theory, embodiment, and action to promote the liberation of all bodies. 

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Instagram: @daviannamoves

Youtube: Davianna Griffin, @daviannamoves

LinkedIn: Davianna Griffin, MFA