About the Contributors
Jody Boyer is a visual artist and arts educator originally from Portland, Oregon. In her studio practice, she explores the broad interdisciplinary possibilities of traditional and new media with specific interests in personal and historic memory, cinema, landscape, the natural world and a sense of place. She received her B.A. in Studio Arts from Reed College, her M.A. in Intermedia and Video Art from the University of Iowa, and her K-12 teaching certificate at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her artwork has been shown in over 75 exhibitions across the country, including at the Des Moines Art Center, Urban Culture Project in Kansas City, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She currently teaches studio art courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and visual arts at Norris Middle School.
Chelsea Call (she/her/they/them) is a queer artist, art therapist, and educator residing in the high desert of Ogap'oge, on the unceded occupied land of the Tewa speaking peoples, a place also known as Santa Fe, New Mexico. An interdisciplinary artist rooted in an eco-psychological framework, her intersectional work focuses on facilitating healing related to grief in the climate crisis. Amalgamating visual, somatic, and ecological processes she believes personal transformation is the gateway to collective change. She is the founder of Curam, Artist in Residency Coordinator for Loam and Art Program Manager for Our Climate Voices. She received her Master of Arts in Counseling & Art Therapy from Southwestern College, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Colorado State University.
Rachel Garber Cole (b. 1985, Boston, MA) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who works across performance, video, sound, text and social engagement. With a background in theater, her practice is deeply influenced by character-based storytelling, which she uses to create worlds that explore the intersection of intimate feeling and public politics. Recent work investigates the affective, perceptual, and psychological effects of climate crisis, seeking to build shared vocabularies that help articulate the experiences of living through this moment of transition. She received a BA in Theater Arts from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN in 2007. Recent exhibitions include La Bodega Gallery, Women Made Gallery, C24 Gallery, The Florida Review Online, Aggregate Space Gallery, Flex Fest, Field Projects, Present Company, NARS Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, Queens World Film Festival, Festival L’Inconnu, Bushwick Film Festival, Blue Stockings Film Screenings, and Grrl Haus Cinema. Rachel hosts a monthly Bring Your Own Film film/video open mic in Brooklyn. She is a recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council’s Community Arts Fund, and Brooklyn Arts Council’s Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC) Grant, and has been granted residencies at Prairie Center of the Arts, The Studios of Key West, Crosshatch’s Hill House Artist Residency, The Ucross Foundation, NARS International Residency Program, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the History Center in Tompkins County. Rachel presented her ongoing oral history project, “The Warmest Years on Record,” at the Oral History Association’s Annual Conference in October 2020.
Susan Darley by profession is an experimental social and licensed clinical psychologist, but by nature she has been creating so-called artwork from as far back as she can remember. Her dream as a child was to be an artist when she grew up. Now, two weeks from her 78th birthday, she continues making art—mostly collages—but is still looking forward to growing up.
Colleen Keough is a hybrid media artist working in lens and time-based media, performance, sound/music, installation, and digital arts. Her work explores the intersection of pop culture, identity, myth, and technology, and investigates feminisms and phenomena associated with the voice, new materialism, techno-culture, and the natural world. Her works have been included in national and international exhibitions and festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Radiophrenia (Glasgow, Scotland), Athens Video Art Festival (Greece), Galway International Arts Festival (Ireland), DUMBO (Brooklyn, NY), Novi Sad Cultural Center (Serbia), Athens International Film & Video Festival (Ohio), Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (Czech Republic), Yan Gerber International Arts Festival (China), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), Loop Video Art Festival (Barcelona, Spain), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), and the E-Poetry Festival (London, UK). She completed undergraduate studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, & DePaul University in Chicago, IL, and earned an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from SOAD Alfred University, Alfred New York. Keough is based in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Rose Muthoni Kibara is an illustrator and artist living in Nairobi, Kenya. Her style comprises of hand-drawn doodle sketches, patterns and vibrant colors. Her vision is to create meaningful art that betters the world.
Sally Kitch is a University and Regent’s Professor of Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is also a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in ASU’s Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and Founding Director of both the Institute for Humanities Research and the Humanities Lab at ASU. Kitch is also active in an international project, entitled Humanities for the Environment (HfE), which she co-developed from an A.W. Mellon Foundation grant. She is currently a co-convenor for the North American Observatory of HfE. Her current environmental humanities (EH) work entails expanding eco-feminist theory and articulating the interconnection between socio-cultural and planetary hazards and redress in the Anthropocene. Recent EH publications include: “What’s Really Toxic in the Anthropocene?”; "Cautionary Notes on Sustainability Principles”; "Experimental Humanities and Humanities for the Environment"; “How Can Humanities Interventions Promote Progress in the Environmental Sciences?” and “Humanities for the Environment—A Manifesto for Research and Action” (co-author).
Stephanie Jordan (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Information and core faculty in the Center for Gender in a Global Context at Michigan State University. Through her academic and artistic work, Stephanie investigates big data in the climate and ocean sciences to address issues of labor, maintenance, and inequity. Her work has been presented at the ACM Conferences on Human Factors (CHI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and published in such venues as the Journal of Communication, Interactions Magazine, and the Routledge Handbook on Art, Science and Technology Studies.
Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International and serves on the Executive Committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. She is the author of the award-winning book Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature. Follow her on Twitter @WECAN_INTL.
Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photojournalist and legal worker. In addition to her studio practice, she has been a human rights observer during political uprisings across the country—from the struggle for water rights in Detroit and Flint, MI, to the frontlines of Ferguson, MO and Standing Rock, ND. Her collages and constructed landscapes are informed by these events. Merola lives in Detroit, MI where she facilitates Know-Your-Rights workshops and coordinates legal support for grassroots organizations through the National Lawyers Guild. She has been awarded studio residencies and fellowships through the MacDowell Colony, BANFF, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Kala Institute of Art, the Society for Photographic Education, the Puffin Foundation, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Merola holds an MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been published and exhibited both nationally and abroad.
Nnenna Okore was born in Australia and raised in Nigeria. Throughout her long career as an artist-researcher-teacher, she has focused on ecological issues steeped in artistic practice, pedagogy and social engagements. As a Chicago art practitioner, Okore has been involved in numerous participatory art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, artmaking and an awareness of current environmental issues. In her most recent art projects, she used bioplastic and environmentally friendly materials from food waste to create new art works. Okore is passionate about dialoguing on environmental issues and is currently involved in collaborative environmental projects in Australia. She is a Professor at Chicago’s North Park University. She earned her B.A. degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (First Class Honors) in 1999, and her MA and MFA at the University of Iowa, in 2004 and 2005 respectively. In addition to numerous national and international awards, Okore is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Award. Her works have been featured in important exhibitions at the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Tang Museum of Art, Skidmore College, NY; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art, New York; Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; Museu Afro Brasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis and Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, NY, and Musée des Civilizations Noires, Dakar, Senegal. Okore’s work is currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art and will be part of the upcoming Brugge Triennial Exhibition.
Yvonne Skaggs, an artist who exhibits two- and three-dimensional work in various venues in New York and New Jersey, studied at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History and the Art Students League in New York. Her varied career included producing maps and technical drawings and designing and preparing exhibits for small history and art organizations. She uses the technique of collage, reassembling elements to sculpt, build and construct images. The papers and fabrics come from many sources—magazines, newspapers and photographs.
Natasha Soto holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden, where she currently teaches writing courses. Her work has been published in La Galería Magazine, Siren Magazine, and forthcoming in the Dominican Writers Association. She is inspired by the ways the human, animal, and plant kingdoms interact in cities.
Amanda Thackray (she/her/hers) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, based in Newark, NJ, whose practice sits at the intersection of craft, sculpture, and environmentally-based social practice. Thackray’s projects have been exhibited widely, both regionally and globally. She is the recipient of a 2020 Creative Catalyst Fund Artist Fellowship and she was recently an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. Her work is in over a dozen public collections including The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Yale University Library, and The Library of Congress. She teaches printmaking at SUNY Purchase and Rutgers University. Thackray earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA from Rutgers University.
Meredeth Turshen is an artist, teacher and writer who lives in Hoboken and taught at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, for more than 25 years. Her art studies began at age ten at the Art Students League in New York and continued, after majoring in studio art at Oberlin College, in workshops and residencies at Pratt, the Printmaking Council of NJ, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, Vermont Studio Center, and Moulin à Nef (VCCA France). She exhibits regularly in the New York metropolitan region and with Viridian Gallery in Chelsea.
Andrena Zawinski is a feminist activist poet whose work has received awards for lyricism, form, spirituality, and social concern, several of them Pushcart Prize nominations. Her latest book is Landings from Kelsay Books; others are Something About from Blue Light Press (a PEN Oakland Award) and Traveling in Reflected Light from Pig Iron Press (a Kenneth Patchen Prize) along with several chapbooks and work appearing widely online and in print. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA she has made her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.