CONNECT

Creative Research + Transdisciplinary Collaboration with Ecosystems

Sensing ecosystems, understanding phenomenologies, cultivating relationships that span scales. Outdoors and in, rural and urban, I collaborate with the idiosyncratic-yet-universal insights waiting to be sensed, spoken, and celebrated.

Artwork + Exhibitions

Extending ecology, letting the light out, water quality-of-life, trees-as-mentors, finding sparkle, what water wants… Art is an inevitable byproduct of the research. From there, exhibitions either grow or connect naturally to external curatorial themes.

Speaking + Writing

Be it presentations, artist talks, panel discussions, guest conversations, podcasts, blogs, or publications, I love sharing and talking shop.

Upcoming chapter: “A Process of Acquaintance: Going Low, Pokey-ing Holes, and Dancing with Dissolution,” Rutledge Press, edited by Dr. David Syring.

Courses + Mentorship

Sometimes, the work culminates into a course. Other times, it’s project-based mentorship. As part of Rutgers University’s Creative Expression and the Environment minor, I lead myself and two other instructors in teaching environmental art and theory to 270 students per semester. Additionally, I am currently mentoring three Research Assistants through Creativity in Conversation: Creative Research as Inquiry, Insight, and Instigator across Rutgers’ Coastal Campus.

Workshops + Experience Curation

Conversational Drawing, Finding Sparkle…I can and have adapted workshops to a wide range of contexts. But also, I often find that workshops can be too “node-like;” I enjoy synthesizing ideas, contexts, and desires into dynamic, unfolding offerings. This includes a current Shimmering Friction Walk collaboration at the University of San Diego as well as Connecting with Trees: Revealing Our Collective Consciousness at Vassar College. See also GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary, process-oriented creative research platform.

Dynamic Systems Consulting

Or whatever you want to call it! Either formally within GROUNDWORK or by wearing the hat elsewhere, those ecological insights keep trickling up the chain. They help me help individuals, teams, and institutions generate ideas, improve resilience, and avoid ossification. It’s process choreography, where we establish fluidity among working parts and cultivate relational health. We sense into opportune moments of relative order within dynamism, we orchestrate energy exchange, we transition possibility into probability. Examples include participation in various academic and climate-themed task forces, GROUNDWORK: Interdisciplinary Cultivation Unit, and consulting for a2ru’s Emerging Creatives.

Relational Leadership

Interspersed through it all is relational leadership, an invisible thread which I am tasking myself with softly, cautiously, making more visible. Listen, absorb, participate, transmit: let’s elegantly, creatively, and kindly recalibrate the round table back toward compassionate, rhizomatic sensibilities.