Program Associate

Shiann Croft

Shiann Croft  (she/her pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and storyteller whose work explores the intersections of art, technology, and ancestral knowledge. Rooted in Black feminist thought and Indigenous worldviews, her practice moves between performance, sound, and digital media to examine how stories, memories, and embodied knowledge systems can be reimagined as living archives.

Working through what she calls “embodied data,” Croft treats the body as both archive and interface — a vessel for transmitting oral histories, sensory memory, and ancestral information that exceeds the written word. Her research asks: What do our bodies remember that history has forgotten? and how might digital tools become extensions of ancestral intelligence rather than instruments of erasure?

As the Founder and Artistic Director of The Coven, Croft curates a creative research collective and interdisciplinary incubator that nurtures the artistic and intellectual growth of Black women, femmes, and gender-expansive beings. Through residencies, workshops, and immersive programs, The Coven bridges storytelling, ecology, and emerging technologies to imagine new ways of preserving and performing Black and Afro-Indigenous memory.