This artist talk with Shana M. griffin (2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow) is part of the Designing Within Conflict, Building for Peace lecture series and Malkit Shoshan’s Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Shana M. griffin is a feminist activist, sociologist, abolitionist, artist, and geographer based in New Orleans. Her practice is research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to violence and social exclusion. She founded PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and socially engaged art. She cofounded Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans.
Throughout the semester, this lecture series will feature conversations with activists, curators, artists, designers, and philosophers at the intersection of art, design, and activism. As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in the public interest, their participatory and relational makeup can generate platforms and agencies that question dominant culture, construct new practices, establish new subjectivities, and subvert existing power configurations.
Designing Within Conflict, Building for Peace is curated by Malkit Shoshan and co-hosted by the Graduate School of Design, ArtLab, and the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School.
Shana M. griffin, 2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow
Shana M. griffin is a feminist activist, sociologist, abolitionist, artist, and geographer based in New Orleans. Her practice is research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to violence and social exclusion. She founded PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and socially engaged art. She cofounded Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans.
Malkit Shoshan, 2024 Senior Loeb Scholar, GSD
Malkit Shoshan is a designer, author, educator, and a member of the ArtLab’s faculty Advisory Committee. She is also the founding director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), which initiates and develops projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and human rights. In her work, she uses spatial design tools to make visible systemic violence, engages with various publics to co-design alternatives that center on social and environmental justice, and advocates for systemic change. Shoshan is a design critic in Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. She is the author and mapmaker of the award-winning book “Atlas of the Conflict, Israel-Palestine” (010 Publishers, 2011), the co-author of “Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise” (Damiani Editore, 2014), and the author and illustrator of “BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions” (Actar, 2023). Her additional publications include “Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism” (NAiM, 2012), “Drone” (DPR-Barcelona, 2016), “Spaces of Conflict” (JapSam books, 2016), “Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations” (IPI, 2018), and “Retreat” (DPR-Barcelona, 2020). Her work has been published and exhibited internationally. In 2021, she was awarded, together with FAST, the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for their collaborative presentation, “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip.”