Water Resources Analyst

Deb Lane has been playing the drums for most of her life. Formerly a member of the Santa Cruz World Beat Band, Pele Juju, she performs with artists throughout the Bay Area and beyond. In addition to her musical endeavors, Deb is a leader in water-use efficiency and works as a Water Resources Analyst.

NGO Administrator

Afia Walking Tree, a renowned multi-instrumental percussionist, performer, educator, earth practitioner, NGO administrator, and longtime activist focused on transformative cultural healing across ethnic and generational lines using drumming as her main tool, is founder of the Drum Mobile, a portable drum-arts learning laboratory that makes accessible the power of African drumming and Permaculture to communities of color internationally.

| Native California Indian Artist

L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmem), an award-winning Native California Indian artist working in many media and a tribal scholar, community activist, and language advocate, has exhibited her artwork in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. She has served or serves on a number of boards, including that of the California Indian Basketweavers Association (for 15 years) and the Cultural Conservancy, and is a founding board member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Languages.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Author

Terry Tempest Williams, one of the greatest living authors from the American West, is also a longtime award-winning conservationist and activist, who has taken on, among other issues, nuclear testing, the Iraq War, the neglect of women’s health, and the destruction of nature, especially in her beloved “Red Rock” region of her native Utah and in Alaska.

Artists

Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized more than 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker's Island Prison.

Co-Founder | Bioneers

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Founder | V-Day

Eve Ensler, Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and one of the world’s most important activists on behalf of women’s rights, is the author of many plays, including, most famously the extraordinarily influential and impactful The Vagina Monologues, which has been performed all over the globe in 50 or so languages.

Artist

Tim Merry works with major businesses, government agencies, local communities, and regional collaboratives to help engender breakthrough systems change through coaching, training, keynote speaking, engagement, and facilitation designed to energize and shake up the status quo. Tim is also a traveling spoken word artist inspired by poets from the ancient Anglo Saxon oral tradition all the way through history to modern poets such as Kate Tempest.

Professor | Bard College

Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. teaches Environmental Literature and Media Arts at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Her writer’s guide, The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir, won a 2017 Nautilus Silver Award. She is also the Publisher of Green Fire Press and leads workshops in purposeful memoir internationally and online.

| Radical Joy for Hard Times

Polly Howells, a former board chair of Bioneers, is a facilitator for the Pachamama Alliance's "Awakening the Dreamer Symposium" and is a core member of Woodstock NY Transition. She trained for ten years with Jungian Analyst Marion Woodman and she co-leads a five-day yearly retreat for women called "Reclaiming Our Lives, Reclaiming Our Earth." She is currently on the board of Radical Joy for Hard Times.

Founder and Director | Radical Joy for Hard Times

Trebbe Johnson, the founder/Director of Radical Joy for Hard Times, a global network devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places, is the author of Radical Joy for Hard Times, 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty, and The World Is a Waiting Lover, and she leads workshops and wilderness trips worldwide devoted to the discovery of wisdom and insight in nature.

| AECreative Consulting Partners

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, entrepreneur in creative fields, and organizer working internationally across spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company, AECreative Consulting Partners, she seeks to engage artists and cultural production in movement building and offers an afro-futurist, intersectional framework that centers the lives and traditions of black womxn. She is author of two forthcoming books, Artist As First Responder, and Riot Babies.

Multimedia Artist

Tara Trudell is a socially and environmentally “engaged” multimedia artist who weaves poetry, photography, film, and audio components into her work. Recently she has tackled issues such as the crisis at the USA/Mexico border. One of her techniques consists of writing poems about topics, then rolling the poems into paper beads that become prayers that transport each poem’s purpose and energy into the world.

Multidisciplinary Artist | thewayblackmachine

Christa Bell is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer from Seattle whose work addresses the spiritual and psychic recovery of Black women in the West. In 2018 and 2019, her co-curatorial project, thewayblackmachine, a digital archive documenting state violence against Black people, toured with ICA Boston’s exhibition, Art in the Age of the Internet, and her solo work, Her Great Battle Against The Truth, exhibited at the 2019 Every Woman Bienial.

Founder | Oakland Public Conservatory of Music

Angela M. Wellman, an award-winning musician, scholar, educator, and activist, is the founder of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music which centers the Black experience in the development of American musical culture and identity. She is presently completing her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison exploring the impact of racism and white supremacy on access to music education for Black students.

Director, Writer and Producer | USC’s School of Cinematic Arts

Jeremy Kagan, an award-winning, internationally recognized director, writer, and producer of feature films and television, is a tenured professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and runs its Change Making Media Lab. Jeremy has directed 12 features including his most recent, Shot. His past films include: Heroes, The Big Fix, The Chosen and The Journey of Natty Gann. Jeremy’s many awards include the Humanitas Award and an Emmy.

Executive Director | Oceanic Preservation Society

Louie Psihoyos, award-winning filmmaker and Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), is one of the world’s top photographers whose work has often appeared in National Geographic and on hundreds of magazine covers. An ardent diver, Psihoyos’ most passionate mission is to reveal the dramatic decline of the oceans and to work to save the planet. His films include the Academy Award-winning documentary, The Cove, Racing Extinction, and The Game Changers.

Assistant Director | New Media Rights

Shaun Spalding, a former commercial filmmaker, is a highly experienced IP attorney specializing in digital entertainment transactions and licensing and the Assistant Director of New Media Rights, a non-profit representing creators and startups otherwise unable to afford legal services. He is also a professor at California Western School of Law and teaches highly popular online courses in legal basics for creatives.

Writer/Producer

Stephen Most, a writer, filmmaker, and playwright, is the author of Stories Make the World, Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary and River of Renewal, Myth and History in the Klamath Basin. The writer/producer of River of Renewal, Nature's Orchestra, and Wilder than Wild, he has writing credits on four Academy Award-nominated documentaries and five Emmy winners.

Associate Professor | UC Santa Cruz

Jennifer Taylor, a filmmaker, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and Director of that school’s Graduate Studies of the Social Documentation MFA program as well as a Sundance Documentary Institute Fellow, makes colorful, character-based films about real people with extraordinary stories. Her work has been shown at Sundance and a wide range of film festivals nationally and internationally.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.

Chief Trickster | Coyote Network News

Caroline W. Casey is the host-creator, “weaver of context” for The Visionary Activist Show (23 + years) on Pacifica Radio Network. With a guiding astro*mytho*politico frame, she highlights guests she views as leading contributors to a “Renaissance of Reverent Ingenuity.” Caroline presents her unique art of “Astro* mythological*political* guiding *meta-story-telling” in myriad multi-media venues.

NGO Administrator

Afia Walking Tree, a renowned multi-instrumental percussionist, performer, educator, earth practitioner, NGO administrator, and longtime activist focused on transformative cultural healing across ethnic and generational lines using drumming as her main tool, is founder of the Drum Mobile, a portable drum-arts learning laboratory that makes accessible the power of African drumming and Permaculture to communities of color internationally.

Water Resources Analyst

Deb Lane has been playing the drums for most of her life. Formerly a member of the Santa Cruz World Beat Band, Pele Juju, she performs with artists throughout the Bay Area and beyond. In addition to her musical endeavors, Deb is a leader in water-use efficiency and works as a Water Resources Analyst.

Youth Performance Company

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company’s extraordinary energy, brilliant choreography and inspired lyrics have been rocking the house at Bioneers for many years. A program of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based violence prevention/arts education nonprofit, the company is a multicultural group of teens that creates original performance art combining hip-hop, dance, theater, martial arts, song, and rap. It has performed locally and nationally since 1993 and has been the subject of two documentary films. DAYPC’s artistic directors are: Sarah Crowell & Rashidi Omari.

Artist

Tim Merry works with major businesses, government agencies, local communities, and regional collaboratives to help engender breakthrough systems change through coaching, training, keynote speaking, engagement, and facilitation designed to energize and shake up the status quo. Tim is also a traveling spoken word artist inspired by poets from the ancient Anglo Saxon oral tradition all the way through history to modern poets such as Kate Tempest.

Singer-Songwriter | Meadowlark Music Class

Noe Venable, a singer-songwriter, music educator and “spiritual activist,” has released 8 adult and 8 children’s albums and toured nationally. A musical facilitator, Noe uses group singing as a tool for community building with people of all ages and also leads an outdoor parent-child music eco and spirit-themed program called Meadowlark Music Class and a weekly intergenerational chorus for women, Mothersong.

Founder | Crescent Moon Theater Productions

Polina Smith is the founder of Crescent Moon Theater Productions and the art curator for the Bioneers Conference. She received her BFA in theater for social change from Concordia University in 2008 and her MFA at the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2008, Polina moved to San Francisco to work with The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women under the mentorship of Rhodessa Jones and study clowning at the Circus Center’s Clown Conservatory. In 2014, Polina founded Crescent Moon Theater Productions to create socially relevant and thought provoking new work that spans across the disciplines of theater, dance, music and circus, as well as produce Blessed Unrest, an annual arts and social justice festival in San Francisco. Learn more at: www.crescentmoontheaterproductions.com

Yustina Salnikova and Joel Stockdill are dedicated to re-imagining our relationship to what we call 'waste'.

Yustina Salnikova and Joel Stockdill are dedicated to re-imagining our relationship to what we call 'waste'.

Indigenous Activist

Remy is a multidisciplinary indigenous activist and artist of many different media from the Black Mesa region on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. By utilizing art, activism and technology, his creations are rooted in his heritage and culture addressing social, environmental and political issues. Remy's work and installations can be seen in the streets, major news outlets, traveling in various exhibits and secured in many of the country’s finest evidence lockers, but not before making its statement to the public pushing the important role art plays within movements.

Founder | The Indigenous Youth Foundation

Monique Sol Sonoquie (Chumash, Apache, Yaqui, Zapotec, Irish) is a multi-faceted educator, artist, activist, author, founder of The Indigenous Youth Foundation, Inc., and a practitioner of Maori Healing techniques, to name only a few of her pursuits. A basket-weaver, documentary filmmaker, youth advocate, and traditional food and medicine gatherer, her most recent challenge is weaving with recycled materials, and she is showing her “Pre-Colonial Post-Industrial Village” art piece at Bioneers this year.

Artist

Rachel Bagby, an award-winning vocal and social healing artist with a Stanford law degree in social change, has mentored women leaders and thousands of audience members world-wide to unleash their voices as instruments of transformation. She is the bestselling author of Daughterhood and Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women’s Voices.

| West Oakland Legacy Project

Neeka Salmasi is an Azerbaijani-Iranian artist and educator in Oakland. She coordinates West Oakland Legacy Project: a youth environmental justice program centered around using visual arts to as a tool for activism and social change. She is passionate about teaching environmentalism in a rooted, and decolonized way. She is also a reporter at KPFA news, as well as author of recent book VATAN: a story of immigration to the United States from post-revolution Iran.

Founder | Tatu Vision Movement

Jada Imani, an Oakland, CA-based workshop facilitator, MC, and founder of the Tatu Vision movement, is dedicated to helping co-create regenerative communities through her performing, event production and hosting, healing practice, and coalition-building with communities of poets, Hip-Hop aficionados, entrepreneurs and Permaculture practitioners.

NGO Administrator

Afia Walking Tree, a renowned multi-instrumental percussionist, performer, educator, earth practitioner, NGO administrator, and longtime activist focused on transformative cultural healing across ethnic and generational lines using drumming as her main tool, is founder of the Drum Mobile, a portable drum-arts learning laboratory that makes accessible the power of African drumming and Permaculture to communities of color internationally.

Water Resources Analyst

Deb Lane has been playing the drums for most of her life. Formerly a member of the Santa Cruz World Beat Band, Pele Juju, she performs with artists throughout the Bay Area and beyond. In addition to her musical endeavors, Deb is a leader in water-use efficiency and works as a Water Resources Analyst.

Zarina Kopyrina, born in the Siberian tundra of the Sakha Republic (aka Yakutia) in a large family, was introduced to the magic of traditional folkloric music and local Indigenous shamanic cultural practices at a young age by her grandmother and others. After graduating from the University of Yakutsk in Economics, Zorina became very politically and culturally active and eventually began a musical career, traveling globally and becoming a widely sought-after performer, one who has created a unique combination of authentic Yakut traditional shamanic sounds deeply rooted in nature and modern musical forms.

Artists

Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized more than 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker's Island Prison.

Artist

Tim Merry works with major businesses, government agencies, local communities, and regional collaboratives to help engender breakthrough systems change through coaching, training, keynote speaking, engagement, and facilitation designed to energize and shake up the status quo. Tim is also a traveling spoken word artist inspired by poets from the ancient Anglo Saxon oral tradition all the way through history to modern poets such as Kate Tempest.

Ana Sophia Demetrakopoulos works at the intersections of trauma-informed practices, adult learning, inter-personal neurobiology, and social and racial justice to promote embodied dialogue, “meaning making,” and collaborative capacity building. Her work seeks to support people to increase their self-awareness, mutual visibility and strategic visioning at the individual and community levels by helping them access and ground themselves in their authentic voices.