Groovin' Griot Season 2 is Here!
Groovin’ Griot is a podcast about how we use dance to tell stories, co-hosted and produced by OreOluwa Badaki and Azsaneé Truss. The term “griot” comes from the West African tradition of oral and embodied storytelling. Griots are traveling poets, musicians, genealogists, and historians who preserve and tell stories via a variety of modalities.
On Groovin’ Griot, we center the African Diaspora and honor the legacies of the griot by talking to the storytellers in our communities who help unpack the role of dance in research, and vice versa. We’ll talk roots, rhythm, rituals, recommendations, and much more. Come groove with us!
Meet Your Hosts

Hosts of Groovin' Griot: Azsaneé (left) and OreOluwa (right).
Azsaneé Truss is a Thinking Artist and PhD Candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She employs frameworks of cultural studies and media studies to research Black cultural production throughout the African diaspora as valid forms of knowledge production. Her work centers Black expressive culture as a site of theory and resistance. Truss uses podcasting, photography, collage, film, and other media, in addition to traditional written forms in her work. In accordance with Black feminist approaches to research, Azsaneé’s work fundamentally seeks to disrupt hegemonic ideas about what constitutes legitimate scholarship through these practices.
OreOluwa Badaki is a Research Scholar at the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her work examines how power moves through bodies and spaces within food and land systems. As a writer, movement practitioner, researcher, and educator, OreOluwa works with youth and their communities to explore food and environmental justice through the creative and performing arts. Her current projects focus on embodied understandings of place within African diasporic experiences. OreOluwa also directs the Body-Ecology Lab (BEL) at the Digital Futures Institute. Find out more here: https://www.bodyecolab.com/
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Email us at groovingriot@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @groovingriot!