Endiya Griffin

Endiya Griffin is a doctoral student in the combined program in Black Studies and Anthropology at Yale University, where she studies how visionary Black feminist worldbuilding practices cultivate life-affirming ways of being beyond the violences of colonial humanism. She earned her B.A. with honors in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California (’23) as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, completing a department award–winning thesis, The Train’s Coming and We Are Too: Contentious Tenses in the Wake of Leimert Park’s Metro K Line.

Grounded in years of tending farms and gardens across Chicago, her work understands Black ecologies as fluid, relational practices of self-determination—where the future is a tense, continuously struggled for, embodied, and made real through everyday rituals of care, remembrance, and collective worldbuilding. She is a Dean’s Emerging Scholar and a 2025–26 Graduate Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at the Whitney Humanities Center.

Keywords: Black feminist worldbuilding; postcolonial humanism; Black ecologies; ritual; memory