Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. Language and plants are central themes through which he develops alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding can intersect. His work takes the form of writing, film, and interactive installations, in which he visually represents his research and explores the boundaries of languages.

Alysia Mazzella is a slow-made candlemaker based in Upstate New York. Her signature collection specializes in traditional beeswax candles like: hand dipped tapers, custom-molded pillars, and the duplero-inspired "Twin Flame" candle. Alysia was named “the person who may have started the current trend in beeswax candle making” by Vogue Magazine, 2020. She is the co-founder of Backland Gardens, a five-acre farmland dedicated to self-sustainability gatherings for people of color.

amanny ahmad is a palestinian-american artist, cook, land worker, and folk herbalist, currently based in the high altitude desert of the land of the taos pueblo people. in her research-based practice, she studies things small & large: whole systems design, food as language, land as life, historical & contemporary relationships between humans & non-humans, botany, mycology, indigenous culinary traditions & plant use, histories of resistance; and how those things can teach us about preservation, survival, and world-making. her research culminates in a variety of forms: writing, photographs, objects, garden design, fermentation, herbal preparations, and most publicly, large scale meals, often cooked over live fire, incorporating local wild ingredients. being in, on, of, and with the land is her main priority & joy. To connect to her work subscribe to her substack and instagram.

Angela is a healing practitioner, traditional medicine keeper, gardener, artist, medium/channeler and ceremonialist. She has continued her indigenous lineage as a young traditional healer (Bontoc and Ibaloi tribes- Igorot, Philippines). Angela is currently a teacher for Ancestral Apothecary, School of herbal, folk and indigenous medicine. She teaches regular series offerings, Ninunong Gamot, Philippine Folk and Ancestral Medicine and Decolonizing Wellness. She loves tending to her garden and facilitating the connection of plants with people. She is a certified Western Herbalist and integrates indigenous ancestral medicine in her classes.

Ang Roell (they/them) is a beekeeper, consultant and the founder of They Keep Bees, which is an LGBTQ+ run apiary co-located in Western Massachusetts and South Florida that raises queen bees and produces hive products. As a consultant Ang Roell is committed to helping clients make the changes necessary to shift organizational culture & practice from a model of dominant power to a model of cooperative power, inspired by the ecological world. Ang holds a Masters of Science in Social Justice Education from Boston University. They are a seasoned public speaker, and educator.

My ancestors are from Africa (Mali, Nigeria, Congo) UK, Italy, Germany, France and Indigenous New Mexico. I am a black, queer, gender non-conforming activist for black pleasure and liberation and rooted in allyship for and with LGTBQIA+Transgender lives. This work of walking with grief and death found me after being diagnosed and hospitalized with a severe case of a chronic illness called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome.

It was at a death of a good friend of mines mother that I experienced what the process of death and dying could be like. I learned death/dying could be full of grief, pain, pleasure, joy, mystery, soul searching, laughing, meaning, longing, creativity and slow quiet presence. I wanted to hold space where all of these experiences could be held.

Ash Sierra is driven by a desire to explore the unseen worlds of plants and psyche. Her background as a clinical herbalist, farmer, distiller and astrologer are wrapped up in an eclectic practice that blends western medical astrology, hermeticism, health justice and eco-psyschology.

Antonia is a clinical herbalist, gardener, artist and co-founder of collectives Brujas and Herban Cura. They are first-gen, born and raised in NYC (Lenape territory). Descended from Mapuche peoples of Chile, their practice is rooted in their cultural lineage and is deeply informed by apprenticeships with herbalists around the Northeast, Central and South America, as well as Thailand.

Arvolyn Hill (she/her) is an outdoor Educator and a community Herbalist with a never-ending curiosity about plants and the natural world. Raised on Schaghticoke land of rural Kent, CT, her love of herbalism grew after the passing of several family members due to preventable environmental illness. She studied at Twin Star Connecticut's School of Herbalism and Energetic Studies and in 2016 opened Gold Feather, an online apothecary and flower art shop. Arvolyn is passionate about reclaiming herbalism for BIPOC communities and using herbs to build ancestral connection. She’s the Manager of the Everett's Children’s Adventure Garden at the New York Botanical Gardens where she creates nature centered science exploration activities for kids. Arvolyn can be found enjoying growing herbs at her local community garden in Harlem, NY.

Atava Garcia Swiecicki, MA, RH (AHG) is the author of The Curanderx Toolkit: Reclaiming Ancestral Latinx Plant Medicine and Rituals for Healing. She is guided by her dreams, the plants, and her Mexican, Polish, Hungarian and Diné ancestors. Atava has studied healing arts extensively for over thirty years and has been mentored by herbalists, curanderas and traditional knowledge keepers. She works as a clinical herbalist, curanderx, and teacher and is passionate about supporting others to connect with plants and their ancestral medicine. For most of her life Atava was planted in Huchiun (Oakland, CA,) where she ran an herb school, organized free clinics and enjoyed being part of a thriving community of curanderx. She is currently living with her wife and cat in Tewa Pueblo territory (Albuquerque, New Mexico) where she is learning how to grow food and medicine in the high desert.

Ava Zarich is a community health educator, gardener, herbalist, and chef. She is influenced by her MPH (Master in Public Health) in Community Health Education, by generations of folk medicine and sustainable agriculture in her Istrian-Croatian family, and by the progressive yet culturally inclusive approaches towards health in her hometown of San Francisco and her longtime home of New York. Her work centers around Balkan Folk Spirituality and Medicine, Cultural Humility and Interconnectedness, Popular Education, Asset Building, and Food/Land/Community Sovereignty. She believes that bringing pathways to health to individuals and their communities is a potent form of resistance and one small step of many needed to heal our planet. Most importantly, she believes all individuals deserve the right to enjoy their lives, the delicious food and healing plants we’ve been blessed with, and the healing benefits of food cooked with culture, curiosity, and love

Ayelet Hashachar dreams of trans women thriving & schemes about ways that biomedicine, holistic medicine and plant magic can work in synergy towards that end. She is a clinical herbalist & a research lover dedicated to mutually uplifting plants & transsexuals, in service of the larger urgent anti-colonial & anti-capitalist imperative to restore and remediate this earth. Ayelet is an anti-zionist, a radical diasporist Ashkenaziyah, & a proud self loving Jewish educator, spiritual consultant & language nerd based in occupied Lenapehoking / Brooklyn.

Blanca S. Villalobos (she/they) is a freelance cultural worker with roots in Southern California and Jalisco. They are a proud, queer daughter of Mexican immigrants and comes from a lineage of educators, artists and dream conduits. Over the past 10 years they have had the honor of working with youth & families of color as a community educator and more recently was facilitating outdoor experiences for communities in the Mojave & Sonoran deserts of California. Blanca is also a volunteer backcountry guide for Signal Fire, a Portland based nonprofit that provides opportunities for artists and creative agitators to engage with our remaining wildlands.

Brandon Ruiz (he/him) is a Community Herbalist and Urban Farmer based in Charlotte, NC. He directs Yucayeke Farms, a community project based on providing affordable access to culturally-relevant herbalism and foods through local farming and educational resources. His focus is on Caribbean medicines and herbalism of the American South.

brontë velez’s (they/them) work and rest is guided by the cosmology and promise of sabbath for black people and the land. as a black-latine transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jíbare and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the levity of comedy. the prayer of their life is to support safe and hilarious passage through climate collapse. they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the earth through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective (leadtolife.org) and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth (weavingearth.org). they are currently co-conjuring a film with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California. mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.

Cara Marie Piazza is a Natural Dyer and artisan working in new york city.

She creates one of a kind textiles only using natural dye stuffs such as botanicals, plant matter, minerals, non-toxic metals and food wastes. She treats her fabrics through alchemical dye sessions, ancient shibori techniques and bundle dyeing, transforming each textile into its very own story. She works with both designers and artists to realize their Natural dyeing needs as well as creates custom pieces for private clients.

Cara teaches workshops on natural dyeing and curates unique experiences merging healing, color and art.

Christine Mahoney Brooks is a Culinary Healing Artist whose work centers traditional Black Indigenous & People of Color (BIPOC) healing practices, cuisine and global food sovereignty. Christine has a background in Ayurveda, lactation support, herbalism/ethnobotany. Her work spans from big brand recipe testing and development to one-on-one nutrition/herbal counseling and even Caribbean Food and Culture cooking classes.

Dr. Claudia J. Ford has had a career in international development and women’s health spanning four decades and all continents. Claudia is a professor of environmental studies at State University of New York, Potsdam, and a midwife and ethnobotanist, who teaches, conducts research and writes about traditional ecological knowledge, spiritual ecology, entheogenic plant medicine, women’s reproductive health, and sustainable agriculture. Claudia is a writer, poet, and visual artist; and a single mother who has shared the delights and adventures of her global travel with her four children.

Daniela Reul is a cook, herbalist, astrologer, and ceramicist, who has been using fermentation not only as a way of cooking but sees it as a philosophy of life as well. Her love for fermentation began almost a decade ago in an alchemy class. Fermentation being the process of decay and transformation has inspired her to see death as a process of releasing the spirit and the rebirth of physical matter. Daniela is deeply passionate about ancestral ways of cooking and living, which are the inspiration for all her practices.

Deb Soule practices as an herbalist and biodynamic gardener and is the author of Healing Herbs for Women, How To Move Like A Gardener and The Healing Garden(2021). Raised in a small town in western Maine, Deb began organic gardening and studying the medicinal uses of herbs at age 16. Her faith in the healing qualities of plants and her love of gardening led her to found Avena Botanicals Herbal Apothecary in 1985. Deb teaches, consults and tends a 3-acre biodynamic garden, which provides numerous herbs for Avena’s remedies and serves as a classroom and a sanctuary garden for pollinators and people.

Devon Mihesuah, an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is the Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas and the former editor of the American Indian Quarterly and former editor of the University Nebraska Press book series, “Contemporary Indigenous Issues.” A historian by training, she is the author of numerous award-winning books on Indigenous history and current issues, including Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (ed. With Elizabeth Hoover) that won the Daniel F. Austin Award presented by the Society for Economic Botany and Recovering Our Ancestors’ Gardens: Indigenous Recipes and Guide to Diet and Fitness, that was recently named the Best Indigenous Book in the US by Gourmand International, American Indigenous Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism, Ned Christie: The Creation of an Outlaw and Cherokee Hero, Choctaw Crime and Punishment: 1884-1907, She also has written five novels.

Diane Ghogomu is a Certified Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Sexuality Educator, and embodiment coach with over ten years of experience working in South America, Europe and The United States. As a pleasure scholar and activist, she combines her academic studies from Tulane and Harvard University with her years of practice of Kundalini Yoga, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Yoga Ayurvedic Massage, Afro-Diasporic music, and dance to provide unique possibilities for seekers to explore their corporeal embodiment and spiritual elevation. She is most passionate about creating safe (trauma-informed), fun, and pleasure-centered spaces to engage with the powerful thread that weaves together each facet of our daily lives -- our embodied sexuality.

Dori Midnight practices community-based intuitive healing, weaves accessible, liberatory ritual spaces, makes potions, teaches, and writes liturgy and spells for collective healing and liberation. Drawing on traditions from her Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish lineage, Dori's work is enlivened and supported by a web of teachers and co-conspirators in Disability and Healing Justice work, queer liberation, and multi-rooted, diasporic Judaism. Dori lives on unceded Pocumtuc/Nimpuc land (Western Massachusetts) with her family, where she tends a garden full of flowers and garlic.

The daughter of Kiskeyan immigrants who grew up living and traveling through the concrete jungle of New York City and the lush campos of Kiskeya (the Dominican Republic), Elsie is an artist, writer, educator, intuitive, and herbalist with a wide array of experience, knowledge, and skills. Descending from generations upon generations of farmers, land tenders, earth workers, and medicine people, she has learned craft and proper reverence from and for the natural world at the feet and side of her elders. In 2008, Elsie formalized her journey in healing and education by pursuing a degree in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Natural Healing. Her work focuses on curating holistic spaces, remedies, and happenings. Through Gold Water Alchemy and Gold Water Education Center, two of her personal initiatives, Elsie shares a vast breadth of wisdom and alchemical talismans, served in drops of elixirs, sacred structures, knowledge shares, and penned insights, alike. The motivating intention is liberation into sovereignty.

Darich Perez Reyes, born and raised in Puerto Rico has dedicated his life to food, traveling and traditional medicine. His biggest inspiration is his grandmother, who has taught him about plants, cooking and traditional fermentation knowledge. Darich’s fermentation journey began with his grandmother teaching him about “Pique” a traditional Fermented hot sauce from Puerto Rico. Beyond his grandmother’s initial inspiration, Darich has done his own research on and experimentation with both traditional foods and ferments of Puerto Rico and with those from the rest of the world. For Darich, experiencing different food traditions, especially those of his ancestors, helps him get closer to his true identity. “My identity through food becomes more of a rainbow the more I look at it. It only makes me feel closer to other traditions and cultures. I understand now that we are really just one family that has been separated into different cultures around the world, creating a beautiful quilt of traditions.” The the last 10 years of his life has been dedicated to learning about fermentation, farming and sharing this knowledge and inspiration with community.

Enrique Salmón, is a Rarámuri (Tarahumara) Indian. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Arizona State University. He is head of the American Indian Studies program at Cal State University East Bay. He holds a BS from Western New Mexico University, an MAT in Southwest studies from Colorado College, and a PhD in anthropology from Arizona State University. He has been a scholar in residence at the Heard Museum and has served as a board member for the Society of Ethnobiology. He has published many articles on indigenous ethnobotany, agriculture, nutrition, and traditional ecological knowledge. He has also spoken at numerous conferences and symposia on the topics of cultivating resilience, indigenous solutions to climate change, the ethnobotany of Native North America, the ethnobotany of the Greater Southwest, poisonous plants that heal, bioculturally diverse regions as refuges of hope and resilience, and the language and library of indigenous cultural knowledge. Dr. Salmon is author of the book, Eating The Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience and Iwígara: The Kinship of Plants and People.

As an educator, historian, griot, herbalist and nationally celebrated radio & tv host, Folúkẹ́ Akínyẹmí shares her passion of teaching Yorùbá language, culture, and tradition with great pride. It is her intention to inspire those learning the language and tradition to trace their ancestral connections to Yorùbá people or others to the African continent. She credits her knowledge and information to her studies in Yorùbá Literature from the University of Ibadan and her training and practice with her elders and family. Folúkẹ́ has offered classes for diverse communities, celebrating the global impact of Yoruba culture across the indigenous diaspora. You can join Foluke’s virtual Yorùbá language & cultural preservation classes throughout the year with Song Of The Spirit Institute. Folúkẹ́ Akínyẹmí lives in her hometown of Ogun State Nigeria.

Frances was born in Puerto Rico, raised in New York City, and stands in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world. As a Woke Foods worker-owner and Farm School NYC graduate-turned-program coordinator, Frances is deeply inspired by the reality of maintaining a healthy relationship with the planet and with one another through connecting with and freeing the land. Frances is a daughter, community organizer, and above all, seeker of truths.

Born and raised in Japan, Indonesia and Singapore, Fumiha Tanaka is a clinical herbalist, Reiki practitioner, and an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, lenape land. She is here to tend to, be a student of, and work with the Mama Earth and navigate and realign the sense of wholeness within each person. Fumiha also applies flower essences, dream healing, brathwork, sound healing, and other healing arts in her practice to reconnect individuals with their inner spirit and to welcome them "home". Fumiha is constantly in awe with what she learns from plants and enjoys connecting with their spirit through drawing and writing.

Gowri Varanashi is a naturalist and teacher at heart who loves rock climbing, playing in nature, and teaches nature connection to kids and adults. She is passionate about connecting people to the environment and surrounding nature, including wildlife. She now continues to reconnect people to wildlife and nature through her organization called Wilderness Ways in India and she also teaches rock climbing to women through an initiative she started two years ago called Climb Like A Woman.

Jade Alicandro weaves a love of bioregional herbalism and kitchen medicine into her work as a community and clinical herbalist. She’s a mother, educator, kitchen witch, writer, tender of a menagerie of farm animals, and half-gardener to her mostly wild gardens which mostly take care of themselves. She offers monthly online classes through her Patreon community, teaches a yearly online class on kitchen medicine, and offers in-person classes on bioregional herbalism and folk medicine-making. She lives in the rolling hills of western massachusetts on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land and is inspired by the wisdom and traditions of her Greek and Italian ancestors.

Jalal Sabur co-founded the Freedom Food Alliance, a collective of small rural and urban farmers, activists, artists, community folks, and political prisoners who use food as an organizing tool. The Alliance founded the Victory Bus Project aimed at connecting urban and rural communities to support families of prisoners with transportation to prison in the Hudson Valley and a box of farm fresh food. Jalal is continuing the work of the Alliance with a focus on Sweet Freedom Farm in Germantown, NY doing farm education, a maple syrup operation and working on building a Grow Foods Not Prisons movement. Additionally, Jalal is a lead educator at Kites Nest, doing youth organizing and building an ATI (alternative to incarceration) program in the Hudson Valley

Jess Turner (she/her) is a Black clinical herbalist, grower and educator whose practice is centered on helping frontline communities build resilience through connection to the land and plants growing around them. In cities, these plants are often discarded as mere weeds.

Jess is interested in exploring the liberatory struggles of the plants and people whom capitalism alienates while building bridges between human and more-than-human worlds. She ferments, forages and grows herbs in unceded Lenape territory.

Jiordi (hebrew variation of the river jordan, meaning to descend or flow down) encounters himself most deeply in places of confluence and immersive study — attentive to the forms of learning that most permit joy, humor, mystery, and contradiction. Through the guidance of the Kashia Pomo, the Fire Forward Fellowship and The Forestry Collective, Jiordi has been trained as a prescribed fire-practitioner to support the equitable return of fire-knowledge and practice back to Kashia tribal territory. Traced by xicano lineages by way of East L.A. to the Sonoran desert in Northern Mexico, and jewish migrations from Romania, Jiordi is most granted breath by inquiries into sonic imagination — as a luthier and instrument designer since childhood, he is theologically entangled in the ways that sound is created, how it travels, and the variance of forms through which it is perceived and given meaning. Jiordi’s current season of work is in discipleship to that which evades the archive. He is the Creative Director for Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains, curator for The Emergence Network, wildland firefighter for Northern Sonoma County Fire District, Forest Technician for the Forestry Collective, and holds an M.A. in Ecology & Spirituality from the University of Wales. Jiordi is currently home-making and attending to sanctuary at the headwaters of the Gualala river in Kashia territory.

Kai is a medicine keeper, healer, educator, community organizer, artist, permaculture gardener, & seed keeper. Kai currently lives on the unceded, occupied Confederated Villages of the Lisjan Ohlone and was born/raised on unceded, occupied lands of the Harsimus Lenni-Lenape. Kai is a descendant of ancestors who were migrant settlers to Turtle Island from the Philippines (Panay Island), China (Fujian Province), Ireland (County Monaghan), Germany (Saarland), and Lithuania (Vilnius). Kai walks in the ancestral healing paths of Hilot (Philippine traditional healing), Emotional release modalities, somatic/energetic healing, and indigenous agriculture traditions. Kai has inherited these teachings mainly from their Philippine ancestry but has also been taught by Taino, Mexica, West African diaspora & European descent teachers. They also practice in the path of engaged Buddhism, with most of their learrning coming from the Theravada (Insight) lineage of Southeast asia. Kai’s main virtual community offering is Filipinx Food as Medicine, a seasonal course where we reclaim ancestral foodways & self-healing practices through a decolonial lens of Philippine & Amerikan society.

kale mays is a deep city memory worker who seeks to repair our relationships to this hypersettled land on which we've experienced both bondage and freedom, greeting the spirits who peer out from the cracks in the concrete. They are a descendant of enslaved Africans, Black Seminole resistors, and Ugahxpa people. They draw their knowledge of territory from both ecosystem and archives -- diving deep into the realm of traditional research, then pulling out to ask elements, ancestors, and more-than-human kin which stories are ready to be shared.

Karla Claudio-Betancourt (she/they) is a queer multidisciplinary artist, educator, cultural affairs director and native to Borikén. She expresses herself in various disciplines, amongst them illustration, comics, zines, photography, sculpture, video and natural She leads an itinerant lab for creative research with wild plants called @la.recolecta which studies local wild plants for food, medicine and craft. Knowledge is collectively gathered and shared through zines, online publications, and workshops. The intention is to walk the line between art, ethnobotany and agroecology through popular, scientific and empirical knowledge. She currently works as a writer, illustrator and producer for the Canadian arts non-profits ArtsEverywhere. She believes in collective healing through art and collaborations with non-human species. Today she lives with many plants and mythology books in Hato Rey, Borikén, and volunteers at the most beautiful community garden in Santurce, @hcsmd.

Kelsey Dayle John is Diné, a member of the Navajo Nation. Her family is from Sweetwater, Arizona near the four corners. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Arizona with a joint appointment in American Indian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies. She studies equine/human relationships with a focus on how these relationships decolonize and Indigenize education and research. She is particularly interested in the social, cultural, and historical narratives of equine/human relations. Kelsey is an Indigenous feminist and loves mentoring Native students. She is currently a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and is working on a book project about equine/human relationships in Indigenous methodologies titled With Horses. Previously, Kelsey taught in the Diné Studies department at Navajo Technical University on the Navajo Nation. She completed her Ph.D. in Education at Syracuse University. For her dissertation research, she worked in partnership with the Navajo Nation to document horse knowledges and stories for the development of Navajo education and research. Kelsey is certified in Equine Facilitated Learning through the HERD institute. In her spare time, she runs with her dogs Remi and June Bug and attempts to train her horses Bambi and Le Doux, but ends up mostly just hanging out with them.

Lauren Giambrone (she/her) is a queer, femme community herbalist, medicine maker & educator living on occupied Mohican Territory in New York’s Hudson Valley. Lauren is the founder of Good Fight Herb Co, a small herbal business organically growing and locally sourcing bioregional plants for making and offering plant medicines and magic. She is also a co-founder and educator with her sister from the stars, Mandana Boushee, of Wild Gather : Hudson Valley School of Herbal Studies. With a Saggitarius sun, and Scorpio moon and rising signs, she teaches and offers from her lived experience, studies, commitment to social and environmental justice, and ever growing exploration into her ancestry and lineage.

Layla Kristy Feghali lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon and her diasporic home in Tongva-Tataviam territories (Southern California), where she was born and raised by her immigrant family. She is a cultural worker and plantcestral medicine practitioner focused on the re-membrance of baladi (land-based/folk/indigenous) lifeways and ancestral wisdoms from SWANA*. Her dedication is to stewardship of our earth's eco-cultural integrity and the many layers of relational restoration and healing that entails. You can learn more at www.RiverRoseRemembrance.com // River Rose Remembrance on IG + FB, and visit the online community archival project she hosts at www.SWANAancestralHUB.org // @swana.ancestral on IG

Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, author, mother, and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for 25 years. She currently serves as founding co-ED and Farm Director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a Black & Brown led project that works toward food and land justice. Her books are Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023). Find out more about Leah’s work at www.soulfirefarm.org and follow her @soulfirefarm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Lexie Smith is an independent researcher and baker whose practice explores food systems and histories, with bread as the locus of inquiry.

Dr. Lila Sharif (she/her) is a creative writer, researcher, and assistant professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She teaches, researches and publishes on environmental justice, Indigenous epistemologies, and ethnic and racial studies. She is currently co-editing A Decolonial Guidebook to Historic Palestine as well as a book on the Indigenous significance of Palestine's olive tree. She is a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective as well as a co-founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s Life Affirming group along with Leena Odeh . Sharif is the first Palestinian to earn a Ph.D. in ethnic studies. She holds a dual PhD in Sociology and Ethnic Studies.

Lily is an Industrial Designer and Ecofuturist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work addresses emerging climates and conditions of cities through design interventions. Using video, food, curriculum, material exploration, products, and installation, she transforms daunting subjects such as water scarcity or temperature rise into approachable topics that invite public participation. Environmental justice and ecosystemic thinking are at the core of her work, as is love and reverence for plants, water, and animals. She currently works as a design consultant for studios and companies that share that ethos. Among other shows, she has been part of the London Design Festival, MoMA PS1 Homeroom, Science Gallery Detroit, and NYCxDESIGN.

Maebh Aguilar is a plant tender, artist, farmer/gardener,, herbalist, writer and seed saver. Their work orbits themes like migration, anti-imperialism, ancestral foods, folklore and cultural use of plants, place-based ecology and the dissolution of state borders. They are Ecuadorian and Irish, from an immigrant family. They were born, raised & live in Philadelphia where they co-teach a Building Your Home Apothecary herbal course and work as staff at Truelove Seeds.

"mandana (ماندانا) is an iranian-american plant hoe aka herbalist, storyteller, and co-educator with her soul binch, lauren giambrone at wild gather: hudson valley school of herbal studies.

her utopian future garden is seeded with night blooming flowers, joyous cackling goldenrod, consensual sense8 orgy lilies, all you can drink pomegranate juice ponds, and trees that grow fenty make-up fruit.

when she's not actively tending her utopian paradise garden she can be found freaking on a puzzle, laying it down at scrabble, reading 5 books at once and drinking tea from the samovar at her crib."

Maria Estela Rojas has been making jam for over 50 years. She grew up in Chile watching her grandmother Mima, preserve apricots, peaches, strawberries, blueberries, cherries, lemons, and tomatoes from the farm that she stewarded. Her grandparents grew everything they ate in what is now considered a “permaculture farm,” which is what in those days was part of their traditional farming practices. Estela learned to make jam from her grandma as a child and continued preserving foods with her mother and family till this day.

Mario Ceballos (he/him/they) is of Yoeme ancestry who lives on occupied Kumeyaay land. Mario is the co-founder of POC Fungi Community (POCFC). The POCFC is an intersectional space for BIPOC people to safely speak and learn about science, environmental and social justice, spirituality, food sovereignty, and access to medicinal and edible fungi, and so much more. Mario will facilitate a space where we can share stories about our fungal kin and how we can incorporate their lessons into our collective healing and liberation. Mario has been involved in social justice movements since their preteens and uses those experiences to organize around mycology and more specifically ethnomycology, the study of humans in relation to the fungal Queendom. Mario is a stay at home parent of three children and when they are not on a nature walk with their children or organizing community events, they enjoy reading books and cooking for friends and family.

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh previously served at US universities including Tennessee, Duke and Yale. He is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University (our latest annual report here). Qumsiyeh has published over 180 scientific papers, over 30 book chapters, hundreds of articles, and several books including “Sharing the Land of Canaan” and “Popular Resistance in Palestine” on topics ranging from environmental impact of colonization to environmental and climate justice to cultural heritage to human rights to biodiversity conservation to cancer. He has overseen a number of projects ranging from formulating the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan to empowerment projects with farmers, women, and children that benefitted tens of thousands. He is laureate of the Paul K. Feyerabend Foundation award the Takreem award, peaceseeker of the year award, among others.

Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey is a 15-year interdisciplinary cannabis professional, working in the legalized markets since 2005. She currently resides in Mexico City, where her work explores cannabis, foodways and the diasporic connections between Africa and Latin America. She is the co-founder of the hemp brand, Xula (@xulaherbs), the co-host of Broccoli Talk podcast (@broccoli_mag), and the founder of a benefit pop-up dinner, Cenas sin fronteras (@cenas_sin_fronteras)

I grew up in the endless boreal forests of Eastern Finland, about two hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, and a hundred miles from the Russian border. My work as a writer and folk herbalist is grounded in my people’s ancestral folk medicine and my culture’s surviving land-based practices. I am also a student of my paternal side’s Palestinian medicine, and love exploring both the striking differences and surprising similarities of the two cultures. Among my many passions are connecting people with their own ancestral folk lineage with plants and writing about the intersections of old ways, ancient practices and the modern world. Through my work, I hope to share plant medicine, ancestral herbalism, community resilience, reciprocity, land-based healing, animism and folk magic for the wild and wooly times we live in. I’m an immigrant to what we currently call the USA, and live on a small island on unceded Coast Salish Territory. In English I use she/her pronouns.

Myrto Daskaloudi is a plant worker, astrologer, tarot interpreter and is in the process of becoming a sex educator. She combines her work behind the veils with plant medicine to provide a bridge between spirit + earth body. Myrto has been exploring different processes of lube making + using plants to enhance + heal the erotic body / pleasure body for the last 3 years .Studying plants at the Vermont Center of Integrative herbalism as her base, she works with plant energetics from the teachings of Ayurveda and the Four Humors. She aims to hold space for people to connect with the spirit + essence of the plants and empower people to have autonomy over their sexual healing.

Nkoula Badila is an artist, singer, songwriter, dancer, farmer and founder of Grow Black Hudson and Nkodia Art. Nkoula is a multidisciplinary artist born of Congolese traditions in New York. She was raised traveling the world performing traditional congolese songs and dances with her family as part of the first National Ballet of Kongo founded by her father. Nkoula's Parents met in Paris and 8 Babies later, they birthed Nkoula. Her tradition influenced her love for beaded adornments. After traveling throughout Central America solo in 2011 she became amazed by the connection between these lands and the similarity in colorful beadwork and patterns and her congolese traditions across the ocean. She began to teach herself bead work to connect with her ancestral traditions and spirit. After the passing of Her father in 2012 She established Nkodia. Nkoula creates pieces for people to feel free in their truth and radiate with the colors of their essence.

Olga Tzogas started her love affair with Fungi and plants over 15 years ago, with the help and guidance of family, teachers and students. In 2011, Smugtown Mushrooms was started, which provided cultivation supplies to grow mushrooms, indoors or outdoors, for food or for medicine. We also host workshops, organize events and bring community together for the love of mushrooms alongside the continuous path towards social + environmental justice. Olga continuously is eager to learn more and embrace the never-ending, vibrance of mushrooms, fungi and the natural world. Olga teaches workshops throughout the continent about wild mushroom identification, medicinal mushrooms, biology, and mushroom cultivation. Olga, alongside the collaboration of the collective, The Mycelium Underground, helped create the New Moon Mycology Summit in 2018. She was a core organizer for the 2016 Radical Mycology Convergence and the MycoSymbiotics Festival from 2015-17. Annually, Olga guides small groups immersing in land based and traditional knowledge of Northern Greece, highlighting the fungi and plants there.

Rachael Petach has spent her life at the intersection of art, food, and agriculture. She has worked in hospitality for more than half her life (notably Chez Panisse, Andrew Tarlow Collective, Salad for President) both front of house and back of house. After a stint living in Madrid Spain where she ran a pop-up restaurant out of her apartment on Tirso de Molina, she spent time WOOFing in France. She holds a degree from UC Berkeley and worked with the student organic gardening association as well as on urban farming initiatives in the bay area. Rachael has produced countless events at the intersection of art and food as well as founding the artist residency program at Wythe Hotel which focuses on elevating Black, queer and trans voices. She was also recently the programming/events consultant for Hudson-based South Front Street, with dynamic spaces opened or opening in Hudson and Catskill (Kitty’s, The Caboose, Mr. Cat). In 2020 she launched her own business, Current Cassis, which focuses on making botanical blackcurrant liqueur from Hudson Valley grown blackcurrants, wild local honey, and botanicals.

Renée (she/ella) Camila is a bilingual (English/Spanish) yerbera and traditional birthworker. Born and raised in San Francisco on Muwekma/Ohlone/Ramaytush territory as the child of Nicaraguan immigrants, her practice La Yerba Buena Herbs draws from her Spanish and Indigenous (Chorotega) ancestry. Trained in traditional energetic herbalism by Karyn Sanders and Sarah Holmes of the Blue Otter School of Herbal Medicine, Renée has been in clinical practice since 2016. Following in the footsteps of her ancestors, she is also a student of Mesoamerican Traditional Medicine (MTM) and Curanderismo. She is dedicated to the empowerment and healing of plant spirit medicine through a social justice lens. She offers energetic herbal consultations, traditional birth care, folk medicine for ritual use, and classes. She is also one of the hosts of the Herbal Highway and co-founder of the Now and Then Herb School.

Ria Ibrahim is rural farmer/homesteader, kitchen magician, and the Farm to Table Manager at Soul Fire Farm, where she brings an ancestral passion for food. Born in South Sulawesi Indonesia, Ria comes from a family of farmers, fishermen and chefs. Her cooking traditions are intimately bound with her homeland of Indonesia where she learned to cook with her mother and family almost from birth. In addition to cooking she was a founder of KOMBES Makassar, a community oriented anti-littering and trash management organization focusing on urban agriculture and building community solutions to Indonesia’s recycling and trash challenges. Ria has a bachelors in international relations from Fajar University, has culinary degree and has worked as a food journalist.

Rochelle Wilbun is a southern Black healing and dance artist. She integrates movement, earth medicine, and ritual through her work as a movement teacher, herbalist, and womb and birth worker. As a full spectrum reproductive companion, she offers physical, emotional, and nutritional support through birth, menstruation, and other reproductive stages. Rochelle holds space for bleeding and birthing people to trust in their bodies’ natural cycles and deepen their relationship to Nature. Rochelle receives wisdom from a long line of educators, conjurers, caregivers, and earth tenders. Channeling African American healing practices and the wise ways of her grandmothers, she works collaboratively with clients to develop individualized tools for healing. Rochelle is honored to have supported over 40 families and individuals through reproductive transitions. She has completed 600 hours of herbal apprenticeship with Flower Power NYC, has studied with B/I/POC herbalists across Turtle Island, and is a 200-hour yoga teacher and energy practitioner. Rochelle finds joy in sharing movement, plant medicine, and energy healing as practices of liberation for all people and the Earth.

Saeng-Fah is a Traditional Thai Body worker, community educator, multi-disciplinary artist and an ever-learning herbalist. They are of Haitian, Thai and European descent.

Samantha is an artist, herbalist, farmer, and medicine maker. She grew up immersed in the ancestral herbal & cultural traditions of her Southern Italian immigrant family of farmers, herbalists, birthworkers, storykeepers, and weavers and is committed to keeping these reciprocal ways of living alive. Sam is clinically trained by Sud Italian lineage herbalists by way of traditional apprenticeship, and after completing became the main caretaker of her elders small farm. She is the founder of Terracotta Farmacia, a small batch apothecary offering a full spectrum of seasonally made whole plant medicine solely utilizing plants she grows and cares for. Sam is passionate about the ancient alchemical arts of distillation, soap making, and working with clay and inspiring others to get in touch with where they come from and the soil they stand on.

Sandeep and Nalini are the co-founders of Princeton, N.J.- based Pure Indian Foods, which makes grass-fed, organic ghee and sells traditional organic Indian foods. Their interest in dairy history grew out of Sandeep’s family’s fifth generation ghee business (started by his great-great-grandfather in 1889) and the culturally significant role that dairy plays within his Indian heritage. The Agarwal’s have brought the Ayurvedic Medicinal Ghee concept to a culinary level by introducing unique herb/spiced ghee products sold as food, which has been recognized by The New York Times.

Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. He is the author of five books: Wild Fermentation; The Art of Fermentation; The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved; Fermentation as Metaphor; and his latest, Fermentation Journeys. Sandor's books, along with the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, Sandor is the recipient of a James Beard award.

Sarah Gotowka is the owner of Luna Fiber Studio, a textile studio based out of in Trumansburg New York. Luna Fiber Studio specializes in natural dyes and weaving, and is rooted in sustainability and social justice. Sarah has been weaving since 2005, and has been growing natural dyes since 2010. She received her BFA in Fibers and Material Studies from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 2007, and her MFA in Fibers and Material Practices from Concordia University in Montreal in 2013. Since moving to the Ithaca area she has taught at SUNY Cortland, Cornell University, Ithaca College, The Johnson Museum of Art, Wells College, and New Roots Charter School to name a few. Sarah is a Korean adoptee and formerly worked for the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York. There she mentored youth adoptees, and advocated around trans-racial adoption issues. Weaving and dyeing have been a powerful healing tool in Sarah’s journey of exploring her roots and connecting to her ancestral knowledge.

Sarah Howard (they/them) is currently a graduate student at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry located in Syracuse, New York on the unceded homelands of the Onondaga Nation. Before grad school, Sarah spent ten years working as a farmer, youth educator, and environmental justice organizer in southeast Louisiana. This experience deeply informs their research, which focuses on cross-cultural partnerships for biocultural restoration. Sarah strongly identifies as an organizer, facilitator, gardener, street medic, and herbalist. Sarah is happiest in the forest.

Sarah Wang is a artist, curator at Disclaimer Gallery and practicing herbalist who has been working with cannabis as medicine for the last 8 years. She makes healing oral and topical medicine for her CBD/THC line called MU Healing and a small batch pepper sauce for her all-natural sauce company, Wang Sauce. She is a photographer who works in documentary photography, collaborating with subjects to tell their stories. She’s an Aries sun + moon + mercury, Aquarius rising with lots of Capricorn mixed in there.

Sha’Mira is a Ph.D. candidate, doula, yoga instructor, and dance student. Her work explores fashion and the body as cultural, historical, social, and political phenomena involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization. Her work is inspired by her grandmother and she is indebted to a lineage of warriors who envision/ed Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty.

Born in Mexico City on Revolution Day in 1982, into a mestizo family lineage, Sofia Florencia’s bloodlines come from the Mexica people of Xochimilko, the Maya people of Campeche, Southern Veracruz, Italy and Basque peoples. Sofia has been on a mission of self-discovery through experiential education since day one. Raised throughout Europe, Turtle Island, Anahuac and Abya Yala.

The alchemy of food is her superpower, Corn and Cacao being some of her oldest ancestors. Aside from her formal hospitality and culinary studies, she has worked in the food industry most of her life working at Millenium, Delfina, Cotogna, Boot and Shoe, etc.; she was also director and teacher at the Matthew Kenney Culinary School in Miami.

Sofia operates the slow-food business Abuelita Technology @abuelitatechnology on the island of Maui offering Organic and Heirloom maize tortillas, along with other delectable morsels to heal hungry souls; she also offers services as a private chef, wellness mentor, massage therapist, and postpartum care provider.

Now living in the Telluride, CO area with her husband, they are raising their son and walking the Red Road as a family.

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and the eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret. You can subscribe to her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com and follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sophie.strand1

Star {they/them} is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person born and raised in Lenapehoking, aka New York City, with roots in Ayiti, aka Dominican Republic. Entangled across the mediums of sculptural installation, time-based media, and book forms, their work explores earth-based pathways for disarming apparatuses of violence and their cycles of trauma. After almost ten years of studying and practicing community-based herbalism, Star is currently sharing their medicine under the self-started project of Botánica Cimarrón. Their formulas are unique stories that weave together the past, present, and future of Caribbean folk healing to bring living systems back into alignment.

Suhaly Bautista-Carolina (she/they), aka Moon Mother aka The Earth Warrior, is an AfroKiskeyan herbalist, artist, arts administrator, educator, mother, daughter, wife, and community organizer. Her practice lives intentionally at the intersection of plant power and people power and centers the collective wisdom of her community and the ancestral legacy of her people, while creating spaces of agency for folks to enter into their own healing. She is a 2018 graduate of the Sacred Vibes Apothecary spiritual herbalism apprenticeship, and carries out her purpose through small batch, moon-powered plant medicine offerings, justice-forward collaborations, workshops, knowledge-shares, and beyond. She has hosted plant medicine-making workshops with spaces including New York Botanical Garden, Gossamer, The Wing, The Museum of the City of New York, Ethel’s Club, Fotografiska, The Highline and several others. She has also guided workshops at the 2nd and 3rd Annual NYC Spiritual Herbalism Conferences. Her ongoing research is centered on Kiskeyan plant medicine in the Dominican Republic and across the Dominican Diaspora in NYC.

She is a proud member of United Plant Savers, Queer Healers, and Herbalists Without Borders. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, and People en Español among others.

She is living + loving in Brooklyn, on Lenape and Canarsee land, with her wife and their baby girl, Luna.

Teju Adisa-Farrar is an environmental equity expert with a focus on sustainable textiles and environmental justice. She supports the creation of regenerative fiber systems and climate resilient strategies for Black and Indigenous communities and people of the global majority. Teju is a consultant, researcher, connector and facilitator living between New York and California.

Tigist is a creative — trained as an architect, now a designer working across media. She is a mother, a wife, an entrepreneur, a cancer survivor, and a life-long learner, arriving in the U.S. from Ethiopia in 2007, ready for a new life in a new home.

She comes from a family of entrepreneurs who built thriving businesses from the very bottom. Her parents, now in their late 70s and 60s, are still going strong in their very imaginative journey of entrepreneurship. She is the creative force behind several ventures: offering visual communications and design for mission-centered, socially conscious, and impact-driven organizations; apparel celebrating leaders and moments in Ethiopian history and the African diaspora; and a curated portfolio of artwork and crafts, from women weavers and makers in Addis Ababa.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse—Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota—is an author, international speaker on Peace, Indigenous and Mother Earth perspective. A survivor of the “Reign of Terror” from 1972 to 1976 on the Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River and Rosebud Lakota Reservations in South Dakota and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs Boarding and Church Missionary School systems designed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” Tiokasin has a long history of Indigenous activism and advocacy. He spoke as a 15 year-old at the United Nations - Lake Geneva, Switzerland. He is a board member of Simply Smiles, and Restorative Practices Alliance. Tiokasin speaks frequently at venues such as Yale University’s School of Divinity, Ecology and Forestry, Union Theological Seminary focusing on the cosmology, diversity and perspectives on the relational/egalitarian vs. rational/hierarchal thinking processes of Western society. Tiokasin is “a perfectly flawed human being” and a Sundancer in the cosmology of the Lakota Nation. He can also be found through First Voices Indigenous Radio & the Akantu Institute.

Tusha Yakovleva is a life-long gatherer thanks to her family and first home - Russia - where harvesting plants and mushrooms for food and medicine is common practice. She spent years in the Muheconneok/Hudson River watershed, growing perennials, keeping seeds, running a wild food program, learning the gifts of weeds, and organizing community gardening and forestry efforts. Tusha’s work revolves around generating strong, respectful relationships between plants and people. She is currently a graduate student at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Onondaga Nation homelands, where she studies how to build generous bonds between land and people.

Vilda Gonzalez is an avid home cook, recipe developer, and a student of holistic nutrition. She is the founder and chef of Sol-Eir, an ongoing series of alchemized food and beverage experiences. Her mission is to rewire our collective relationship to what eating well truly means; with the highest regard of respect for our body, our community, and our earth. She believes that food should be delicious, flavorful, and indulgent, but it should also be deeply nourishing, regenerative, and inherently healthful. Vilda also works with individuals to strengthen their personal relationships with food through means of intuitive cooking and connection.