Samantha Griffith

Samantha Seurynck Griffith (born in Ann Arbor MI, 1994), is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, coder, teacher and early career fine artist living and working in Detroit. She explores the ways in which physical and digital mediums are woven together by overlapping processes in digital design, creative coding, printmaking, and craft. Her main tools are the Processing coding environment, the web browser, her axidraw pen plotter and a loom.

Inquiring on what it means to move away from a client-driven, commercially-oriented mindset into an intuitive one, her work is not bound by the dogmatic ideals that guide much of the field of graphic design. More interest is placed in process than perfection; sometimes this means she’s making an unintuitive drawing tool and prompting people to use it; other times she’s sending a set of images to a machine learning algorithm to see what it makes with them; or for a poster on poetic computation, she once asked a writer to compose a poem with the rearranged text from the poster copy, creating two connected posters instead of just one. This practice is the result of a curious generalist with too many tabs open, crafting connections in content and form between techniques, materials and people.

Samantha studied graphic design at the College for Creative Studies and has been a student at the School For Poetic Computation and SSHH NYC. She was honored to be an artist in residence at Eureka! House and C/O Gallery for the Distributed Web of Care Residency in 2022. She’s been an instructor in Interaction Design and Typography at the College for Creative Studies and Wayne State University, respectively.