Ryan Griffis (Art and Design) is a 2025–2026 HRI Faculty Fellow. His research project, “When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped,” is a multimedia artwork focused on wetlands in the Central Illinois River Valley, combining documentary interviews, landscape imagery, and speculative poetry and visuals.
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My current project, “When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped,” consists of an experimental documentary film, drawings, writing, and other forms of media. It is about ecological restoration in the context of ongoing settler colonialism and extractive relations with land in the Illinois River Valley. The project combines forms of documentary storytelling and speculative fiction, along with an improvisatory collaboration with other artists.
What drives your interest in this research?
My interest in ecological restoration in this region originated in previous bodies of work that focused on industrial agriculture and the terra forming of the land by the settler nation state. Moving here from other parts of the continent, my first experience of the land and territory of the so-called corn belt of the Midwest was probably like a lot of settlers and visitors here; the seemingly endless corn and soybean fields appear as if they’ve always been here, a pastoral backdrop with no history. They are, however, just one aspect of a near-total transformation of the complex biological and cultural ecologies in this region that required the mobilization of laws, technologies, and extreme violence.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
In my experience, the fellows seminar is one of the rare places where truly cross-disciplinary discussion happens in the academy, in a way that is simultaneously rigorous and generous. HRI’s welcoming embrace of such diverse creativity and scholarship encourages me to not only be more thoughtful in my own research, but to be fully present and engaged with the work of the other fellows. As an artist that often works within collectives and other forms of collaboration, I find the HRI fellows seminar to be exemplary of a shared space for learning that reminds me why I do what I do.