Biography

Favianna Rodriguez Giannoni is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and entrepreneur based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her work centers joy and healing, while challenging entrenched myths and dominant cultural practices. Favianna's creative partnerships include companies like Ben & Jerry's, Spotify, Old Navy, and Playboy Magazine. She has completed a number of large scale public art commissions with the City of San Francisco and the Presidio National Park. Through her poignant speeches, she has inspired audiences around the world including at the United Nations Climate Summit, Sundance Film Festival, Smithsonian, Google and Lush Cosmetics. Favianna's creative practice serves as a record of her human experiences as a woman of color embracing pleasure and womb healing through creative expression and personal transformation. Her signature mark-making embodies the perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in Oakland, California during the era of the war on drugs and the birth of Hip Hop.

A strategy advisor to artists of all genres, Favianna is regarded as one of the leading thinkers and personalities uniting art, culture and social impact. Through her thought leadership as President and co-founder of The Center for Cultural Power, an organization igniting change at the intersection of art and social justice, she has been instrumental in building a cultural strategy ecosystem that supports BIPOC artists in the U.S. She helped launch the Constellations Culture Change Fund, a philanthropic initiative designed to build cultural power by investing in BIPOC artists and grassroots art organizations.

Favianna is a recognized climate justice leader, and brings her personal journey to the climate justice fight through her writing, including as a contributing writer to the best selling anthology, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson.

In 2016, Favianna was awarded the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship for her work around immigrant detention and mass incarceration. In 2017, she received an Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity for her work around racial justice and climate change. In 2018, she received the SOROS Equality Fellowship for building the field of cultural organizing. As an entrepreneur, she has co-founded various institutions, including the EastSide Arts Alliance, a cultural center and affordable housing development in Oakland, CA.

Favianna is currently working on a feature film about healing from generational womb trauma.