Endiya Griffin

Endiya Griffin is a farmer, artist, memory worker, and griot committed to studying, practicing, and teaching the art of Black feminist worldbuilding. She is a doctoral student in Black Studies and Anthropology at Yale University.

Through years of tending farms and gardens across Chicago, Endiya has come to understand Black ecologies as fluid, relational practices of self-determination— where the future is not a distant horizon but a tense that must be continuously struggled for and embodied through everyday rituals. In these spaces, the boundaries between mind and body, human and other-than-human, blur through collective acts of care: hands pressed into rich Black earth, seeds planted and gathered across generations, structures built to hold both dreams and daily labor. Worldbuilding becomes an embodied healing ritual that composts historical dispossession into new worlds of possibility. The future is not a distant horizon but a tense, continuously lived and made real through acts of remembrance, stewardship, and visioning.

At Yale, Endiya explores how visionary Black feminist worldbuilding practices cultivate life-affirming ways of being beyond the violences of colonial humanism.

She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow who earned her B.A. with honors in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California (‘23) after completing her department award-winning thesis, “The Train’s Coming and We Are Too: Contentious Tenses in the Wake of Leimert Park’s Metro K Line. Currently, Endiya is a Dean’s Emerging Scholar and a 2025–26 Environmental Humanities Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center.