2021

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.

LaUra (she/her), a 2012 Environmental Humanities graduate, is a truth-seeker, community-builder, cultural critic, and grief worker. She is also the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. Inspiration finds her in natural landscapes and honest, open-hearted dialogue. She is the founding director of the Good Grief Network and has been studying and cultivating personal and collective resilience strategies for nearly a decade. She is trained in nonviolent civil disobedience and is a Climate Reality Leadership Corps member & mentor.

Kailey Kornhauser has taken on many roles since graduating from the Environmental Humanities Program in 2017: facilitator, policy analyst, planning commissioner, PhD student, and advocate for body size inclusion in the cycling world. She is currently a PhD candidate in Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. She is interested in collaborative forest governance and public engagement on National Forest Lands in Oregon.

Francesca received her M.A. in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah in 2018. She now works as the Communications Coordinator at the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, and she is also the author of four environmentally-themed novels--Call of the Sun Child, Listen, The Seas of Distant Stars, and Blue Mar, which was her final project for the EH program.

Jai graduated from the Environmental Humanities Program in 2018. After graduating from EH, Jai went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University. Jai has had great success as a young poet and is widely published.