I'm
Giizhigad
she/her
Storyweaver • Filmmaker • Artist • Cultural Worker

Bio

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.

Select Films & Art Works

"I see my work as a web weaver, utilizing the ancestral technologies of storytelling in order to strengthen and uplift kinship. I carry with me teachings about the way stories move through space and time connecting the human experience with the divine, the spirits of the earth and our non-human kin. I seek to create work that re-routes our neural pathways and helps us to re-member these ways of being."
- Giizhigad

Manoomin I

Wild Ricing is a traditional food and way of life for native people here in the Great Lakes. This video documents the first time I went ricing, sharing wisdoms and heart truths that came from the experience.

Ogaawag I

This film documents our continued journey of learning Anishinaabe lifeways and being in relationship with the land, netting walleye.  It shares through an authentic lens the relationships being built between urban indigenous people from Detroit and indigenous people living on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota.

Dibaajimowinan

Dibaajimowinan is about the importance of sharing our personal stories. Our sacred creation stories teach us how to live and our dibaajimowinan are the dynamic ways in which we create our realities, our personal creation stories. This is the first of a series of films where I am sharing my personal story as a way to weave kinship by sharing heart truths.

Artist Residency

Summer • 2022
"Kinship is possible, when we embody the truth that “I” am “my” relative and “my” relative is “me”; water is our relative"
-Giizhigad

I had the pleasure of being a part of On Being's inaugural cohort for this residency where we were exploring the questions:

What does it mean to be human?
How do we want to live?
Who will we be to each other?

My goal with this project was to explore and deepen our relationship with water, realizing along the way that they are a koan.

View Project