Gianina K.L. Strother is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose research and creative interests focus on the study of race, class, gender and sexuality within both staged performances and the performance practices of everyday. She is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her work is situated at the intersection of Black Studies, Dance Studies, Contemporary African American Theatre, Critical Race Theory, Ethnography, Storytelling, and Performance Studies.

Gianina is a recipient of a Site Visit Grant to the University of Ghana, Accra (2024); Teaching Social Action Fellow (2024); Mafungo Summer Writing Fellow (2024 & 2023); SLIPPAGE Research Panelist (2024); Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellow, Michigan State University (2024); Faculty Success Program, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity Stipend (2023); Digital Fellow, College of Arts and Letters (2022); International Program for Creative Collaboration & Research Grant recipient to South Africa and Ghana (2020 & 2018); recipient of the James F. Harris Arts & Humanities Visionary Scholarship and ARHU Graduate Student Travel Grant (2019); Deans Fellow (2017-2019); and former Research Associate at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of African Americans and the African Diaspora.

She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Media from Columbia College Chicago, BS in Chemistry from Howard University and certificates in Diversity and Inclusion, Project Leadership and Nonprofit Executive Leadership from Cornell University and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University-Purdue University. Gianina is in the final stages of completing her doctoral degree in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has also studied abroad at the United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya and has conducted autoethnographic research in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Japan, and South Africa -- including visits to the slave castles of Cape Coast, Ghana.

She has won numerous awards for her work in promoting diversity in higher education including the Diverse Black Africa (DBA) Award, African Alliance Partnership, Michigan State University (2023); Columbia College Chicago’s Graduate Opportunity Award (2008), Columbia College Chicago Diversity Award (2008), Getz Graduate Award (2007) and the Lya Dym Rosenblum travel grant (2007). She has served as a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant and facilitator to schools and professional organizations, and has worked professionally as an educational adviser within the nonprofit sector. 

Gianina has performed her one woman play, Just how black? (2009), an ethnoautobiographical exploration into the performativity of Blackness throughout the African Diaspora, at The Kennedy Center's 15th Annual Page-to-Stage New Play Festival; Stage TWO Theater; Book and Paper Gallery at Columbia College Chicago; and the Raw Space Gallery in Chicago.  Her work has been featured in many publications including the United States International University Gazette Newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya--I am point five (0.5): half-African, half-American (2004), and The Columbia Chronicle (Rodriques, 2003). 

She has worked as a museum educator and docent for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of African Art.  Gianina has a fervent passion for West African dance and is a performing artist with TeMate Institute for Black Dance and Culture in Detroit, Michigan.

When she's not doing all of the aforementioned you can catch her spending time with her spirited toddler and loving partner, writing to Andre 3000s New Blue Sun, sipping Tazo Organic Awake English Breakfast Tea, or falling asleep to reruns of Schitt’s Creek.