EH Blog

Current Mellon fellow, Sav Pearson, reflects on art and activism around the Great Salt Lake community.

Alisha Anderson graduated from the Environmental Humanities Program in 2015. During her time in the program, she made art about the Oquirrh Mountains. Since then, she has created with Great Salt Lake, been a Spiritual Ecology Fellow with the Kalliopeia Foundation, and lived at the edge of Bears Ears as an Artist in Residence with Utah Diné Bikéyah. She just defended (and passed!) her thesis to receive her MFA from the Art & Ecology Program at the University of New Mexico. Her project focused on the energy transition in Carbon Country, Utah. Overall, her work focuses on the confluence of identity and Earth, in an attempt to question (and reposition) how humans fit in this world.

Natalie Slater is a second year student and Mellon Community Engagement Fellow. In partnership with the nonprofit Art Access, Natalie created and is facilitating an artist collaborative called Embodied Ecologies that looks at environmental health issues in Salt Lake from the lenses of environmental justice and disability justice.

Tiana Birrell is a multimedia artist and curator from Massachusetts. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MS in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. She currently resides in Salt Lake City where she investigates the copious amount of water and energy used by data centers in Salt Lake and Utah Valley. She uses photography, video, projections, installations, and performative lectures to consider these questions as well as bring these invisible structures into visibility.

Katharina Gerstenberger is Professor of German in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. She served as the interim director of the Environmental Humanities Program for the 2020-2021 academic year. She also served as department chair for World Languages and Culture from 2012-2018. Katharina was the 2019-2021 Environmental Humanities Research Professor, and she is currently a Virgil C. Aldrich Faculty Fellow with the Tanner Humanities Center. She is researching and working on a book about nuclear narratives.