Rachel Berwick’s (she/her) multi-media installations examine the threshold between nature and culture as a means of exploring themes of extinction and loss, and our inevitable desire to recover what is lost. She has had five solo exhibitions in New York—“Lonesome George,” at Sikkema Jenkins in NYC was also included in “Becoming Animal” at Mass MoCA. Her installation, “Zugunruhe” was exhibited at Brown University and The Smithsonian American Art Museum.

For over twenty years, she has developed and maintained a work titled “may-por-é,” in which parrots she trained to speak an extinct indigenous South American language live in a sculptural aviary, exhibited at venues such as The Serpentine Gallery, London, the 26th Bienal de São Paolo and the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT.

Berwick received a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and a Smithsonian Artists’ Research Fellowship where she first began working on bird migration and the stories birds carry with them through time and space. Berwick has taught at Yale School of Art and is currently professor in the Glass Department at The Rhode Island School of Design.

Marianne Boruch's (she/her) eleven books of poetry include Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon, 2021) triggered by her 2019 Fulbright in Australia observing its astonishing wildlife. Her prose: three essay collections, recently The Little Death of Self  (Michigan's "Poets on Poetry" Series), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Among her honors: the Kingsley-Tufts Award for The Book of Hours, a Guggenheim, two NEAs, and residencies at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, two national parks (Denali and Isle Royale) and a previous Fulbright at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Her work appears in APR, Poetry, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere.  After 33 years of teaching at Purdue University, Boruch went rogue and emeritus in 2018. Since 1988, she has continued to be on faculty at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. This Spring, 2022, she is the Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Maddy Butcher (she/her) graduated from Brown University with independent studies in English and Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology.

She worked for nearly two decades as a free-lance reporter for The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications, covering sports, travel, business, front page, and investigative work while raising three sons.

She is the author of three books, including Horse Head: Brain Science & Other Insights and, her latest, Beasts of Being: Partnerships Unburdened. She founded and is executive director of the Best Horse Practices Summit, a non-profit organization which conducts an annual educational conference. She lives in southwestern Colorado and occasionally writes of life in the rural west for the Washington Post.

Amanda Coleman (she/her) is the Adoption Program Director with Foster Parrots and the New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Rhode Island College. Amanda has worked for conservation minded A.Z.A. zoos and aquariums for nearly 20 years in the areas of education, research and animal-care. She has a background in animal behavior and holds an active membership with the International Association of Avian Trainers and Educators.

Connie Crawford (she/her) connects across species. As Marsha Z. West Director-in-Residence of Rites and Reason Theatre and Adjunct Lecturer in Theatre Arts at Brown University, she guides humans in the techniques of acting and directing. As a lifelong horse woman, she is inspired by Tom Dorrance to improve her equine partnerships. She is privileged to learn from dedicated horse people like Harry Whitney and Bryan Neubert, among others. Connie is a national facilitator of interspecies communication workshops. Her workshops combine performance techniques with alternative approaches to horse/human interactions in order to develop more productive partnerships. She has led workshops in many different states with different populations: medical students and practitioners, actors, horse enthusiasts and professional horse trainers. Connie’s articles and photographs can be seen in national publications. She dedicates this talk to her teachers Sugar and Spice, Golden Charm, Bat Chick, Lady Pattern 68, Rambo and Moxie.

Samantha is a human-centered designer and researcher co-creating experiences, services, and products that promote healthy, equitable, and prosperous communities. Her work blends equity, science, and play to envision and move towards preferable futures. Her experience includes designing at Zwift, Foundation Medicine, Hennepin Healthcare System’s Upstream Health Innovations, the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, and Mad*Pow. Samantha served as the co-creator of the Designer's Oath and sits on the board of directors for Creature Conserve. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. When she is not designing, Samantha enjoys embroidering patterns of bacteria onto household objects.

Bathsheba Demuth (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. An environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her prize-winning first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton) was named a Nature Top Ten Book of 2019 and Best Book of 2019 by NPR, Barnes and Noble, Kirkus Reviews, and others. A current Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Demuth is starting work on her second book, a biography of the Yukon River watershed from colonization to climate change. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and other-than-human species intersect. Her writing on these subjects has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Kelly Duker (she/her) is the current Director of Animal Care at Foster Parrots, The New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary. She was raised in Michigan where she received her Bachelors of Animal Science at Michigan State University, concentrating in industry animals. She then interned and worked in caretaker roles at farm animal sanctuaries, and as a veterinary assistant in New York. She grew very passionate about  birds, animal welfare, and the sanctuary community. She is also an avid hiker, backpacker, beach comber, and vegan of 10 years.

Thalia Field's three most recent books engage animal-human crises through explorations of narrative, scientific, and philosophical entanglements: Personhood (New Directions, 2021); Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction (Solid Objects, 2016); Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions, 2010). A professional performance of Personhood can be downloaded from www.category-other.com or other streaming platforms. Look for Bird Lovers, Backyard to appear as a sound performance streaming this year as well!

David Frank (he/him) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in Philosophy at Brown University. His research focuses on values and ethics in environmental sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Texas in 2012 with a dissertation on philosophy of conservation biology, and has since held postdoctoral positions at New York University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Tennessee, developing research collaborations with environmental scientists and teaching courses on environmental ethics, research ethics, and philosophy of science.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (1980, New York City, she/they) writes ethnobotanical literary criticism, and collages detritus into heraldic devices engaging ever expanding networks of reference through the granular analytics of poetic inquiry. Her work has been published, anthologized, exhibited, and reviewed by About Place Journal, The Recluse, Belladonna*, Kore Press, Pinsapo Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Ugly Duckling Presse, Artists Space, Issue Project Room, Hyperallergic, and 4 Columns. Formerly a Monday Night Reading Series curator at The Poetry Project, site director for Wendy's Subway, and an artist-in-residence at Rauschenberg Residency, Greaves is currently based in Providence, Rhode Island where she is Young Mother of The Florxal Review and a candidate for the MFA in Poetry from the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Photo: Jeremy Patlen Photography

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is the Former Faculty at Indian Arts Institute, Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation, and Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado, is an internationally recognized public reader, speaker, and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. In July, 2014, DARK. SWEET. New and Selected Poems, was published from Coffee House Press. Her other books are Indios (Wings Press, 2012) INDIOS is a long poem and also a one woman performance piece)ROUNDING THE HUMAN CORNERS (Coffee House Press, April 2008, Pulitzer nominee) and the well-regarded novel PEOPLE OF THE WHALE (Norton, August 2008). Works include novels MEAN SPIRIT, a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This is a book about the oil book in Oklahoma, affecting numerous tribal nations SOLAR STORMS, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and New York Times Notable Book of Year. POWER was also a finalist for the International Impact Award in Ireland. It was based on the killing of a Florida Panther, a most endangered species.

Recently graduating from Rhode Island College with a BFA in Ceramics, Haley Johnson is a Mashpee Wampanoag artist making a difference in their community. They are currently an artist in residence at The Steel Yard in Providence, RI, expanding their creative practices through teaching and creating in the industrial arts space. They also serve as the Education Intern through the Indigenous Empowerment Network at the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, RI. Their internship has led to their involvement in Creature Conserve as a Curatorial Scholar, aiming to expand the Indigenous perspectives throughout the gallery exhibition, ReExamining Conservation.

Olivia Maliszewski is a senior at Brown University, studying Science, Technology and Society (STS). Through this department, Maliszewski studies a combination of Biology, Visual Arts, and Indigenous Studies. A member of the Rappahannock tribe, Maliszewski is most passionate about art, decolonizing environmental conservation, sexuality gender roles, and feminism and much of her own artwork centers around these topics. She draws, paints, and sculpts, and works on very small to very large scales. Additionally, Maliszewski works with bats in the Simmons Bat Lab at Brown.

Iris Montero (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She specializes in Colonial Latin America and works at the intersection of the history of science and Indigenous studies. She is completing her first monograph, What the Hummingbird Knows, which examines the influence of Indigenous intellectuals on the shaping of the early modern genre of natural history from 1500 to 1800. Her pathbreaking research on the Florentine Codex received the 2021 Robert F. Heizer Award for Best Article in the field of Ethnohistory by the American Society for Ethnohistory, as well as an honorable mention for the Best Essay Prize in Colonial Latin American and Caribbean Studies by the Latin American Studies Association. This fall she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and is currently analyzing the rich corpus of Mesoamerican codices in France as an invited researcher at the Alexandre Koyré Center for the History of Science in Paris.

Photo by Dan Komoda.

Thangam Ravindranathan (she/her) is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. Her teaching and research interests include the contemporary French novel, ecological perspectives on literature, and the question of the animal in fiction and philosophy. She is the author of Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Donner le change. L’impensé animal (with Antoine Traisnel, Éditions Hermann, 2016), and Là où je ne suis pas: Récits de dévoyage (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012).

Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate and a recent chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently, Not Go Away Is My Name, preceded by A Small Story about the Sky, The Dangerous Shirt, and The Theater of Night, which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, he has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border, and most recently a novel, A Good Map of All Things. Ríos is also the recent host of the PBS programs Art in the 48 and Books & Co., for which he won a 2020 Rocky Mountain Emmy Award. University Professor of Letters, Regents’ Professor, Virginia G. Piper Chair in Creative Writing, and the Katharine C. Turner Chair in English, Ríos has taught at Arizona State University since 1982. In 2017, he was named director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Photo credit ASU.

Alison C. Rollins (she/her), an MFA Literary Arts candidate at Brown, is a Black, queer woman who identifies as an artist, writer, educator, and librarian. Born and raised in St. Louis city, she is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award; and in 2020, the winner of a Pushcart Prize. She holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Some of her current fascinations include boxes, body armor, and bells as well as plants, animals, and robots. You can find her interviewing trees or at her website: www.alisoncrolllins.com

Ada Smailbegović (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. She is a cofounder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Select articles and poetic work have included “From Code to Shape” (differences, 2018), The Forest / On Waiting (Doublecross Press, 2017), “Cloud Writing” (in Art in the Anthropocene, 2015) and "Gertrude Stein’s Zoopoetics" (College Literature, 2019). She is the author of Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds – a book about poetry and science and nonhuman scales of perception that the performance Snail Cinema is based on.

Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani makes work that excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States, and the Greater Middle East. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and resituates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. The composition depends on the question at hand. For example, how can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is also an assistant professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator.

Dr. Lucy Spelman is a lifelong animal lover, educator, scientist, and writer. As a board-certified zoo and wildlife veterinarian, she treats all species. As a researcher, she has studied giant otters, giant pandas, and mountain gorillas. She is a National Geographic Explorer and a senior lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches biology. In 2015, she founded Creature Conserve, a nonprofit organization bringing artists, writers, and scientists together to study and respond to the problems facing animals today.

As Writer-in-Residence for Creature Conserve, Susan Tacent combines her love for the written word with her deep respect for all creatures. As an educator, (Brown PhD, Comparative Literature) she’s taught students from kindergarten through college, and also runs a lively assisted living book club, seven years strong now, where the participants’ collective wisdom and grace exceeds nine hundred years. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Slice Magazine, Coolest American Stories 2022, Reckoning, and elsewhere.

Matthew Thurber is a cartoonist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY, where he operates Mrs William Horsley,  a studio producing experimental narrative. Thurber’s unpredictable practice includes Fleegix, a feature length 16mm film viewable only as a live performance; Mining the Moon, a full length musical play; an olfactory performance, dressed as a giant nose; Mouse Maze, a mosaic labyrinth installed in an elementary school; and hundreds of performances as Ambergris and in other ensembles. He is the author of 1-800-MICE, Infomaniacs, Art Comic, and Mr Colostomy.

Tina Tryforos (she/her) is a photographer, educator, and book artist living in Rhode Island. A native of Queens, NY, her work is informed by the urban surroundings of her childhood. Her work explores human ecology and the complicated relationship people have with the natural world. Her photographs are quiet comments on the disquieting evidence of human impact on our planet.

Early work as a photo librarian at Magnum Photos in NY began Tryforos’ enduring interest in archives. She is committed to multiple long-term projects and approaches her work as a collector – mylar balloons, taxidermy animals, seven-year-olds, annual family portraits posed with a plastic rabbit on Greek Easter, symbols of the goddess Persephone – and she produces exhibits and artist books from these collections.

Tina Tryforos is the recipient of the 2020 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) Fellowship in Photography.

Kari Weil (she/her) is University Professor of Letters, College of the Environment and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University.  She is the author of Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Thinking Animals:  Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP, 2012), Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia, 1992), and numerous essays within the fields of animal studies and feminist theory. Her current research explores the legacies of animal magnetism in theories of affective influence, tactility, and traumatic healing.