National Magazine Award finalist McKenzie Funk writes for Harper’s, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. His first book, Windfall, won a PEN Literary Award and was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Salon, and Amazon.com. A former Knight-Wallace Fellow and Open Society Fellow, he is a co-founder of the journalism cooperative Deca and a board member at Amplifier. He speaks five languages and is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife and sons.
Born in Topeka, Kansas in a military family, Carol Rashawnna Williams is the only child of Bessie Williams & Willie C. Williams. Soon after birth Carol and her family moved to Frankfurt Germany where she grew up on a military base and went to German schools until she was 11 ½. At which time she and her mother settled in Tacoma, WA. Carol graduated from Mount Tahoma High School, went to the Evergreen State College, was an Upward Bound student of 4 years.
Carol’s mother was a certified missionary and gave her life to community service for over 25 years, feeding and sheltering those who were homeless. or re-entering society from prison. Carol’s father was a patriot and believed in American Democracy. He gave 28 years of his life to his country through military service.
After graduating from college Carol was accepted as a Vista-Americorps for 1 year in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood working with young single mothers of Head Start students get jobs and get into school. Carol had her first group exhibit at the Seattle Central Community College Gallery in 1990 when she attended Seattle Central College, it was a community college. Her second group exhibit was in 1996 at the Evergreen State College at which time her work was acquired and catalogued into The Evergreen State College’s (TESC) video art library and showcased into the TESC student anthology book.
Carol is a mother to 2 children. She currently resides in Seattle, WA and works to mentor emerging artists from various backgrounds. Carol is a musician of 21 years who plays the violin and the viola. Carol enjoys hiking in the Pacific Northwest’s numerous old growth forests. Carol was certified thru the City of Seattle Parks & Recreation Urban Forest Educator Program and loves to teach about conifers, indigenous and invasive species. You can find her walking all over Seattle.
Carol deeply believes in the power of art to build community, bridge community relationships and create authentic space for healing.
Sarah Jaquette Ray is an associate professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where she also leads the BA program in Environmental Studies.
She is author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (University of Arizona Press, 2013), which considers ways in which environmental ideas have been used for purposes of social control and oppression in the U.S. She has co-edited two collections: Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory (University of Alaska Press) and Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (University of Nebraska Press), both published this year.
Ray is working on two new scholarly projects: a co-edited volume titled Latinx Literary Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial, and a book that argues that environmental studies and science instructors need to take students’ emotions about climate change and social injustice seriously in the classroom: Coming of Age in the Anthropocene: Climate Justice Pedagogies and Affective Resilience. Her talk for this lecture series, “What Do the Arts and Humanities Have to Do with Our Environmental Crisis?” will focus on the important role that the arts and humanities play in addressing environmental problems.
From Molly Dilworth…For me, creative practice is a tool for investigation and problem solving. Using data from a specific site as a structure, I give form to the things that invisibly motivate our actions. I have partnered with green building organizations, climate change activists, arts organizations and government agencies to make public art that addresses our relationship to history, nature and technology. Currently, I am investigating the relationship of domestic space, global trade, feminism, labor and craft.
From the rooftops of Brooklyn to the Pedestrian plazas of Times Square, I have created outdoor site-specific paintings in New York City and exhibited across the United States. I have been a resident artist at the Salina Art Center in Kansas and in the Art & Law Program with the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in NYC. My work was part of Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good in the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale.
I have been an artist in residence at Recess Activities/Pioneer Works (2012), in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program (2013) and Smack-Mellon (2014). In the spring of 2013 I installed a permanent exterior painting for the Garden at The James Hotel in Lower Manhattan. Recent commissions include a 6,000 sq. ft. mural for Toledo, a temporary garden for a city block in Seattle, and a sculpture for a light rail station in Denver.
I am an artist-researcher, educator, poet, and activist. I’m an immigrant from Taiwan—a contested spit of land with a long history of colonization. As the mother of two beautiful human beings, I struggle to pass on ancestral knowledge that I hang onto, by a very thin thread, worn thin by the mandate to assimilate. I’m learning to listen for the thread that resists the loud clamoring of a fossil-fuel dependent culture of capitalism, globalization, and neo-liberalism. Our world has been fractured and broken; I believe the stories of our ancestors, stories of young and old, from the wildly diverse corners of the world, need to be gathered together to restore cultures of care and love. I do the work of listening to and gathering stories in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, where I am the Program Director, and at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Rhode Island. Though I currently live in Rhode Island, my soul migrates from shore to shore at regular intervals, touching down in rural Vermont, suburban Chicago, and coastal Port Townsend.
Ju-Pong Lin collects stories from her neighbors, makes art on her couch, in galleries and in theaters. Laundry, bread, and everyday stories are the seedlings for Ju-Pong’s interdisciplinary, socially engaged videos, participatory installations and performances. She received her MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa, and has shown her work nationally (Women in the Director’s Chair, Walker Museum of Art, and New York’s Mix festival.) She has taught media arts on the faculty of The Evergreen State College, and is currently the Program Director of the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Ju-Pong lives in Rhode Island and parents two children, who school her in the practice of love and compassion every day.
As an artist, Ju-Pong fuses story circle, video, needlecraft, and community organizing to advocate for grassroots sustainability education and climate justice, in solidarity with indigenous movements to reclaim space.
