Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Film, video, installation, printmaking
Website: trinamrobinson.com
Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco-based visual artist and educator. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2022, where she was awarded the Yozo Hamaguchi Award, and now teaches there. Before her MFA, she worked for a decade in print and digital media production at The New York Times T Magazine, Vanity Fair, the California Sunday Magazine, and Slack. She is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and a 2024 nominee for the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) Award. She has been an artist in residence at Recology San Francisco (2025–26), the Black Space Residency at Minnesota Street Project, and the Kala Art Institute. As a storyteller, she has performed on The Moth Mainstage at Lincoln Center in New York and toured stages in San Francisco, Portland, Omaha, and Westport, CT; her story aired on NPR's Moth Radio Hour in October 2019. A forthcoming solo exhibition is scheduled at Fresno Art Museum in 2027.
Robinson works in film, video, installation, and printmaking, using a research-based, embodied, and multidisciplinary approach rooted in personal and historical archives. For nearly a decade, her practice has centered on the genealogical excavation of her own ancestry — tracing matrilineal lines from Senegal through Kentucky, Ohio, and California — in order to create immersive installations that engage memory, migration, and the layered geographies of Black life in America. All of her work begins with archival research, mining the records of ancestors' lives — census data, slave schedules, river records, church documents — and then translating that research into film, handmade paper, printmaking, and sound. Her films introduce deliberate glitches as a formal strategy for representing release, recovery, and the imminence of loss. She also makes her own paper from fibers connected to ancestry. A recurring concern is the making-visible of stories that dominant historiography has rendered invisible — including, specifically, the absence of Black American histories in the archive of conceptual artist David Ireland, whose former home at 500 Capp Street she has transformed into a site of counter-memory.
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