Grounded in ideas of Black autonomy, spatial identity and embodied resistance, Griffin’s research considers the Black body as both a living repository of history and a force for change.
Tristian Griffin, MFA '26: Documenting Ancestry Through Movement
Tristian Griffin came to the Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) program for its interdisciplinary focus and the opportunity to extend his choreographic practice through Duke’s broader academic resources. He will graduate in May with an M.F.A., as well as a graduate certificate in African and African American Studies.
“The ability to engage beyond the studio, integrate Black studies into my research and thesis, while also being guided by the insights of exceptional faculty — those are the primary reasons I came to Duke,” he shares.
Griffin arrived with an already distinct choreographic voice. After earning degrees in ballet and English from Texas Christian University, he went on to work with companies including Garth Fagan Dance, Springboard Danse Montréal and the Metropolitan Opera House before founding the Tristian Griffin Dance Company.
At Duke, his practice deepened through the MFAEIP, where he expanded both his creative and scholarly work. His time in the program was recognized with the Outstanding Student Choreography award from the American College Dance Association and a Duke Global Affairs Research Fund grant, which supported a month-long residency in Cotonou, Benin. There, he worked with Marcel Gbeffa’s Centre Chorégraphique Multicorps student company, Trans d’union.
“Being in Benin profoundly shifted my artistic vision, as I came to understand how space holds energy, trauma, resilience and memory,” Griffin explains. “I had considered space as secondary; now I see it as inseparable from embodied practice, working in tandem with the body.”
These experiences and evolving perspectives converged in Griffin’s thesis project, “The Black Palimpsest,” which brought together his choreographic practice and research into an exploration of embodiment, space and Black diasporic experience.
“The M.F.A. program provided the time and resources necessary to deepen my research and enabled me to travel to sites of consciousness across Africa, Europe and North Carolina,” he shares. “These experiences prompted a more rigorous interrogation of my work into Black consciousness, transgenerational inheritance and my own genealogy.”
That movement across geographies, archives and inherited memory, runs throughout “The Black Palimpsest” — a work drawn from the idea of a palimpsest: something written over but never fully erased, where the earlier traces remain visible beneath what comes after.
The performance was centered at the Stagville Historic Site, once among the South’s largest plantations. Guided by Griffin, a figure searching for ancestral truth suspended between fact and intuition, a collective of artists called up memory through movement, sound and ritual. The work was less about reconstruction than encounter: An unfolding act of remembrance and revelation that invoked spirit, lineage and the persistence of Black presence across time and place.
As Griffin prepares to leave Durham for the next stage of his career in Richmond, Virginia, he shares that he’s bringing with him a set of ideals shaped by his time at Duke.
“The most significant is a commitment to intentionality — approaching my artistic practice, research and relationships with purpose and critical awareness.”
