Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, plant ecologist, writer and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and the ecology of mosses. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science education for Native students, and to create new models for integration of indigenous philosophy and scientific tools on behalf of land and culture. She is engaged in programs which introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge.

Dr. Kimmerer has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues as well as a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation. She is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America. Dr. Kimmerer serves as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Nature and Humans. Of European and Anishinaabe ancestry, Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. Dr. Kimmerer is the author of numerous scientific papers on the ecology of mosses and restoration ecology and on the contributions of traditional ecological knowledge to our understanding of the natural world. She is also active in literary biology. Her essays appear in Whole Terrain, Adirondack Life, Orion and several anthologies. She is the author of “Gathering Moss” which incorporates both traditional indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives and was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. Her latest book “Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants” was released in 2013 and was awarded the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. She has served as writer in residence at the Andrews Experimental Forest, Blue Mountain Center, the Sitka Center and the Mesa Refuge.

She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Nicholas Gervasi

Nicholas Gervasi, AIA, is a licensed architect, writer, preservationist, and educator.

He is a Project Architect at Terreform ONE and Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York City College of Technology. He previously worked for Gensler & AYON Studio in New York, NY, Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative in Cleveland, OH, and Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio in New Orleans, LA. In 2014, through a grant from the Columbia University Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, he investigated microalgae as a source for wastewater treatment and biofuel production as a Visiting Climate Researcher at the Climate Impacts Group under Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. His writings have been published in the Charrette, Clog, de-arq: Revista de Architectura, Int|AR, Infection, Journal des Rêves, and TRANS-Media.

He earned an M.S. in Historic Preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation; M.Arch and B.Arch at Tulane University. He is licensed in the State of Ohio, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, and LFA.

Peder Anker

Professor Peder Anker’s teaching and research interests lie in the history of science, ecology, environmentalism and design, as well as environmental philosophy. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Dibner Institute, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and been a visiting scholar at both Columbia University and University of Oslo. With Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim, Professor Anker is the co-author of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014), a showcase of design research as it relates to visionary architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and ecological planning. He is the author of From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), which explores the intersection of architecture and ecological science, and Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order of the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Anker’s current book project explores the history of ecological debates in his country of birth, Norway. He received his PhD in history of science from Harvard University in 1999. Links to his articles and up-to-date information about his work are available at http://pederanker.com.

Mitchell Joachim

Mitchell Joachim, PhD, Assoc. AIA, [jo-ak-um], Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Formerly, he was an architect at the offices of Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. He has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships with TED, Moshe Safdie, and Martin Society for Sustainability, MIT. He was chosen by Wired magazine for “The Smart List” and selected by Rolling Stone for “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. Mitchell won many honors including; LafargeHolcim Acknowledgement Award, ARCHITECT R+D Award, AIA New York Urban Design Merit Award, 1st Place International Architecture Award, Victor Papanek Social Design Award, Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability, Architizer A+ Award, History Channel Infiniti Award for City of the Future, and Time magazine’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities Car. He’s featured as “The NOW 99” in Dwell magazine and “50 Under 50 Innovators of the 21st Century” by Images Publishers. He co-authored four books, “Design with Life: Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities,” “XXL-XS: New Directions in Ecological Design,” “Super Cells: Building with Biology,” and “Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned”. His design work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Venice Biennale. He earned: PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, MArch Columbia University.

Phoenix Players Theatre Group

The Phoenix Players Theatre Group (PPTG) is a performance collective founded by incarcerated men, located in the Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. In the words of the group’s founders, “[PPTG] is a transformative theatre community, which utilizes theatre to reconnect incarcerated people to their full humanity.” Since 2009, PPTG has held small, tight-knit workshops for two hours each Friday evening, with the aim of creating a space where imprisoned writers and performers can be witnessed, and where they can initiate a process of personal, cultural, and sociopolitical transformation. At the time of this writing, PPTG comprised eight incarcerated members living in Auburn Correctional: Nate Powell, Demetrius Molina, Adam Roberts, Sheldon “Superb” Johnson, Raymond Van Clief, Mark “AZ” Thompson, Jerome Walker, and Robert “Bam” Lawrence. Additionally, two non-incarcerated volunteers participated in writing the introduction and editing the other sections: Nick Fesette and Bruce Levitt.

Marsha Weissman

Marsha Weissman holds a Ph.D. in Social Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. She is the founder of the Center for Community Alternatives, a not-for-profit organization that works to end mass incarceration and was its executive director until 2015. She has served on the New York State Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice and the State Council Community Re-Entry and Reintegration. Dr. Weissman has worked and written about criminal and juvenile justice reform and has been active in campaigns to end criminal history screening in higher education and efforts to end the school-to-prison pipeline. She is the author of “Prelude to Prison: Student Perspectives on School Suspension” and currently is an adjunct professor of sociology at Syracuse University.

Nicholas Fesette

Aimee Cox

Areas include expressive culture and performance; urban youth culture; public anthropology; Black girlhood and Black feminist theory. Recently completed Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship in Post-Industrial Detroit. Choreographer and dancer, toured extensively with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/ Ailey II. Founder, The BlackLight Project, a youth-led arts activist organization housed at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Currently co-editor of Transforming Anthropology, journal of the national Association of Black Anthropologists.

Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla

Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla is an assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies in the Humanities Department at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, City University of New York. She has also taught at Harvard University, Oberlin College, and Syracuse University. Lara-Bonilla has published and lectured widely on transnational US Latina/o contemporary literature, turn of the century and post-movement Latina/o literature, self-referential writing, theories of identity, and feminist thought. Her research has received awards such as Harvard University’s Real Colegio Complutense Doctoral Fellowship, a PSC-CUNY research grant, and a CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication award. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Latino Studies and New York History and edited volumes such as American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy in the Literature and Culture of the United States (2011) and Gale Researcher. Lara-Bonilla is also the editor of “Stirred Ground: Non-Fiction Writing by Contemporary Latina and Latin American Women,” issue no. 11 of the Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana (December 2014). As a creative writer, she has published in journals such as Stone Canoe, Literal Magazine, and Vice Versa.

Kathy Engel

I write, convene, facilitate, build, cook, dance, swim in the ocean, listen to birds, hang out with my family and friends. And I like to sit doing nothing or swing in a hammock. I am obsessed with questions of community, equity, excavating hard truths, whiteness and racism, Palestine, welcome. Recently poems have appeared in Poet Lore and Women’s Voice for Change. My work is forthcoming Poetry and the anthology “Ghost Fishing.”

In 1983, with a group of women, I started MADRE. Since that time I started and helped start a bunch of projects, including The Hayground School.

I performed my elegiac long poem “The Lost Brother Alphabet” with dancer/choreographer Suchi Branfman at The Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, Calif in Dec. 2014.

I am amazed and inspired by the innovation and courage of young people and grateful for the leadership of #BlackLivesMatter and all those young people growing food thoughtfully.