Bio
Gillian Maris Jones, Ph.D. is an Afro-Indigenous scholar, creator, and traveler native to Bulbancha//New Orleans, Louisiana and The Lucayan Archipelago//The Bahamas. Maris believes that honoring ancestral knowledge is key to toppling the global hierarchies of racial capitalism. She inherited her practice of griot photography from her father, Morris Jones, Jr., and endeavors to capture the world as she sees it with stories and images. Maris loves exploring new places through music, food, and plants, and she jumps at the chance to learn a new dance.
After twelve years at an arts public school studying dance and creative writing, Maris finished high school at the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy. In 2015, Maris graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a BA in Anthropology and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies. Her ethnographic research in Brazil resulted in an honors thesis entitled: "'They Don't Care About Us': An Examination of Cultural Citizenship and Political Activism Among Afro-Brazilian Youth in Salvador, Bahia."
Maris is constantly engaged in the process of decolonizing her mind and collaborating with those around her to help them do the same. She is an experiential educator who envisions a world where theory and action come together to make a positive impact with/in transnational communities. With the support of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Maris earned a doctoral degree in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and has received graduate certificates in Africana Studies, Latin American and Latinx Studies, and with the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Her research, funded by Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, collaborates with coastal and island communities occupied by the United States empire to utilize ethnography in exploration of climate vulnerability and adaptation. With field sites in Borikén//Puerto Rico, Bulbancha//New Orleans, and Hawai’i, Maris’s scholarship engages contemporary Black and Indigenous survival practices that were developed through the multigenerational transmission of knowledge to navigate the ongoing environmental and social aftermaths of hurricanes. Her research is but a part of a larger life-practice rooted in reverence for her African, Houma, Lucayan Taíno, and Seminole ancestors.
