Giizhigad
Giizhigad is an Anishinaabe artist, filmmaker, and cultural producer based in Detroit and founder of Storyweb Collaborative. As a storyteller through the main medium of film, she is building a practice of filmmaking that actively embodies liberation. Her creative process is participatory, organic, and emergent in how the stories and people on the other side of the lens are in active engagement, dialogue, dance, and solidarity with the creative concepts conveyed.
Rooted in ancestral knowledge systems, she seeks to create art that opens and reignites neural pathways connected to indigeneity, interconnection, and imagination. She is inspired to guide people through experiences that increase empathy, compassion, and relationship to people and more-than-human kin. They are passionate about contributing to the landscapes of healing justice, environmental justice, and cultural work by weaving stories into webs, and by mapping and strengthening our relationality. Her praxis in storytelling is rooted in their ancestral knowledge systems as an Anishinaabe person, where stories travel through spacetime and their meanings and lessons are multidimensional. Giizhigad believes stories have the capacity to heal and educate, as well as spark creativity, movement, and change. For CYCLE II, COUSIN supported Giizhigad’s creative practice.