Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco based visual artist. Her work has been shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, Minnesota Street Project, New York’s Wassaic Project, and the prestigious triennial Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work is also included in Paper is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures at San Francisco Center for the Book, a traveling exhibition co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer. She had a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), a Smithsonian Affiliate, as part of their Emerging Artist Program 2022-23. Robinson is a 2024SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? published earlier this year by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. She previously worked in print and digital media in production at companies such as The New York Times T Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slack before receiving her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2022.
As a storyteller, she traveled the country telling the story of exploring her ancestry with The Moth Mainstage at Lincoln Center in New York, in addition to touring with them on stages in San Francisco, Portland, OR, Omaha, NE and Westport, CT. Her story aired on NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour in October 2019. She received her MFA from California College of Arts in Spring 2022.
In 2023 Catharine Clark Gallery presented a Media Room screening of Trina Michelle Robinson’s video work in a show titled Revival. A follow-up to Robinson’s acclaimed Emerging Artist Program presentation at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Revival featured a suite of three video works that reflected on histories of slavery and emancipation, as well as celebration and joy through acts of rediscovering family genealogies.
