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.

Executive Director | National Compadres Network

Héctor Sánchez-Flores is the Executive Director of the National Compadres Network (NCN), an organization that develops and supports culturally centered programs for boys and men of color, Latino and Indigenous youth, and families. NCN draws from the ancestral wisdom and resilience of communities affected by trauma and racism to promote deep healing and transformative, equitable change.

| Sacred Circles Center

Jerry Tello of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan ancestry, raised in South Central Los Angeles, has worked for 40+ years as a leading expert in transformational healing for men and boys of color; racial justice; peaceful community mobilization; and providing domestic violence awareness, healing and support services to war veterans and their spouses.

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.

Author

Kami McBride’s 30 years of teaching herbal medicine is steeped in her calling to activate a deep connection with the earth in our culture and to inspire the next generation to love and care for plants. Kami has taught herbal medicine at UCSF School of Nursing and has helped thousands of families learn to use herbs for self-care. She is the author of The Herbal Kitchen.

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.

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.

Founder | Revolutionary Love Project

Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action.

| 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.

| Sacred Circles Center

Jerry Tello of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan ancestry, raised in South Central Los Angeles, has worked for 40+ years as a leading expert in transformational healing for men and boys of color; racial justice; peaceful community mobilization; and providing domestic violence awareness, healing and support services to war veterans and their spouses.

CEO | Black Executive Men

Jewel Love is a licensed psychotherapist, CEO of Black Executive Men, and Creative Director for Urban Healers. All three of his ventures seek to help men heal, establish healthier relationships, and launch their unique purposes in life.

Co-Founder | Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education

Will Scott is a co-founder and member of the teaching team at the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education. He co-creates nature-based, relationally-focused educational initiatives that reside at the intersections of ecological health, human development, social justice, and emergent response.

Executive Director | National Compadres Network

Héctor Sánchez-Flores is the Executive Director of the National Compadres Network (NCN), an organization that develops and supports culturally centered programs for boys and men of color, Latino and Indigenous youth, and families. NCN draws from the ancestral wisdom and resilience of communities affected by trauma and racism to promote deep healing and transformative, equitable change.

Chair | Everett Program

Chris Benner, Ph.D., the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation. He has authored or co-authored six books (most recently Equity, Growth and Community) and more that 70 journal articles, chapters and research reports.

Environmental Architect

Stuart Muir Wilson, an environmental architect, lecturer, writer, development consultant, Permaculture teacher and mushroom grower with a special focus on ecological justice issues, has worked at both international and grassroots levels in Mexico, Germany, Nepal the U.S. and Australia on a range of projects that seek to catalyze positive environmental and social systems change.

Founder | Santa Cruz Permaculture

David Shaw, a permaculture and whole systems designer, facilitator, and educator, founded Santa Cruz Permaculture and the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a partnership with the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” He supports communities locally and globally to transform their shared future through strategic dialogue and collective action.

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.

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 | Revolutionary Love Project

Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action.

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.

National Director | The Butterfly Movement

Brandi Mack, an Oakland, CA-based holistic health educator, massage therapist, and Permaculture designer, has worked in holistic health and ecological sustainability with youth and adults for 16+ years. She is currently National Director of The Butterfly Movement and serves on the boards of: Northern America Permaculture Magazine, Northern California Resilience Network, and Northern California Women in Permaculture.

Founder | The Bodhi Project

Sonali Sangeeta Balajee, former Senior Fellow at The Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley, is the founder of The Bodhi Project, which promotes practices at the intersection of Belonging, Organizing, Decolonizing, Health, and Interconnectedness. Sonali previously spent 13 years in government in Portland, OR, and also has 20 years’ experience in dance and music performance and 35 years’ practicing yoga and mindfulness.

Founder | Standing in Our Power

Taij Kumarie Moteelall is a writer, performer, facilitator and coach as well as a highly successful fundraiser for social movements. She founded Standing in Our Power, a national network of women of color leaders committed to holistic transformation, sustainability and wellness for all across the gender spectrum, and co-founded Media Sutra, which seeks to be a vehicle for self-determination and collective liberation for creative entrepreneurs of color.

co-founder | Dynamic Vitality Method

Suki Munsell, Ph.D., co-founder of the Dynamic Vitality Method (a blend of sports science, somatic awareness and Asian internal arts), began her career in 1974 under the guidance of her mentor Anna Halprin (still going strong at 99!). Suki has been teaching dance, fitness, biomechanics, and her unique Dynamic Walking program (detailed in Prevention’s Complete Book of Walking), to people of all ages for decades.

co-founder | Dynamic Vitality Method

Russell Munsell, co-founder of the Dynamic Vitality Method, has had a 40+ year career training human capacities in a wide range of disciplines, including teaching Mathematics at Humboldt State and creating a number of Stress Management, Accelerated Learning and Performance Optimization programs. He continues to coach medically referred clients in his Dynamic T’ai Chi and Qigong, Swimming, and Walking trainings.

Director | Go Wild Institute

Jolie Elan M.S., the founding Director of Go Wild Institute, is an ecologist, ethnobotanist, educator and spiritual director. Weaving modern science with ancient earth wisdom, Jolie helps people and organizations connect with our sacred, sentient earth. She has worked on countless environmental campaigns including restoring sacred forest groves in India and developing the sustainable herbal medicine sector in Kosovo. She teaches widely and considers Oak trees to be her greatest teachers.

Author

Kami McBride’s 30 years of teaching herbal medicine is steeped in her calling to activate a deep connection with the earth in our culture and to inspire the next generation to love and care for plants. Kami has taught herbal medicine at UCSF School of Nursing and has helped thousands of families learn to use herbs for self-care. She is the author of The Herbal Kitchen.

Founder | Organization of Nature Evolutionaries

Pam Montgomery, one of the nation's most renowned herbalists for three decades+, teaches internationally on plant communication and nature consciousness. Organizer of the Green Nations Gathering since 1989 and a former board member of United Plant Savers, she recently founded the non-profit Organization of Nature Evolutionaries (O.N.E.) and is the author of Partner Earth; A Spiritual Ecology and the best-selling Plant Spirit Healing; A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness.

Co-founder and President | Botanical Dimensions

Kathleen Harrison, renowned ethnobotanist and educator, has done extensive fieldwork among Indigenous cultures since the 1970s, specializing in studying plants and fungi used in ritual, healing and art, including traditional psychoactive species and their lore. Co-founder of the non-profit, Botanical Dimensions, and Director of its Ethnobotany Library in Occidental, California, Kat’s fieldwork includes a long relationship with Mazatec healers in Mexico that her daughter, artist/filmmaker Klea McKenna, is making a film about.

Professor | UC Santa Cruz

Lise Getoor, Ph.D, is: a professor in the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Cruz; Director of the Data, Discovery and Decisions (D3) Research Center; a Fellow of the Association for Artificial Intelligence; and a former board member of both the International Machine Learning Society and the Computing Research Association. Her research interests include machine learning, reasoning under uncertainty and responsible data science, and she has published 250+ scientific papers.

Chair | Everett Program

Chris Benner, Ph.D., the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation. He has authored or co-authored six books (most recently Equity, Growth and Community) and more that 70 journal articles, chapters and research reports.

Founder | Santa Cruz Permaculture

David Shaw, a permaculture and whole systems designer, facilitator, and educator, founded Santa Cruz Permaculture and the Right Livelihood College at UC Santa Cruz, a partnership with the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” He supports communities locally and globally to transform their shared future through strategic dialogue and collective action.

Founder | End Well Project

Shoshana Ungerleider, MD, a physician, philanthropist and speaker, works as an internist at Crossover Health in San Francisco. She is the Founder and President of End Well, a media platform and annual interdisciplinary symposium on design and innovation for the end of life experience. This is a premier convening for thought leaders from design, technology, healthcare, policy, spirituality, entertainment, the arts, education and patient advocacy with the goal of creating solutions to make the end of life more human-centered.

Founder | Recompose

Katrina Spade, a designer, activist and entrepreneur dedicated to radical innovations in our society’s death care experience, founded Recompose, a benefit corporation dedicated to offering earth-centric, participatory, and meaningful death care to the public in 2017. An Echoing Green and Ashoka fellow, she has a background in architecture and anthropology.

Executive Director | Humane Prison Hospice Project

Ladybird Morgan, Executive Director of the Humane Prison Hospice Project (whose goal is to make prisoner-provided hospice services available in California’s 33 prisons), has been working in end-of-life care and on the frontlines of sexual violence as a registered nurse, clinical social worker, and educator for 20+ years. She has worked with many organizations including The Zen Hospice Project, Hospice By The Bay, and Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

Author

Anneke Campbell is an author/community activist/yoga teacher who has worked as a midwife, nurse, English professor, and has recently trained as a death midwife/educator. She co-authored (with Thomas Linzey) We The People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the U.S., co-edited (with Nina Simons) Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, edited Nina's new award winning book Nature, Culture and the Sacred: One Woman Listens for Leadership, and co-produced with her husband Jeremy Kagan the dramatic feature film, Shot, which she also scripted.

Founder | TreeSisters.org

Clare Dubois is the founder of TreeSisters.org, a women's reforestation and culture-change organization dedicated to humanity’s emergence as a “restorer species.” For 23 years she has been facilitating body-based, experiential sessions designed to help participants shift consciousness and experience their interconnectedness with nature, the root of balanced leadership and action.

Executive Director | Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Ph.D. (in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is also Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). She has published twenty books.

Anthropologist | Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Medicines

Emily Sinclair is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the globalization of ayahuasca and its impacts, especially in the Iquitos region of Peru where she was based between 2014 and 2018. She is a member of the Ayahuasca Community Committee of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Medicines, and a leader of the Ayahuasca Community Guide for the Awareness of Sexual Abuse initiative.

Training and Supervision Associate | Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

Sarah Scheld, a Training and Supervision Associate for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Public Benefit Corporation, helps coordinate and develop curriculum for their MDMA Therapy Training Program. She recently collaborated on a Code of Ethics for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy providers. Her work focuses on trauma awareness, somatics, and the ethical use of psychedelic medicines to help heal people, communities, culture and the environment.

Chair of the Board | Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Monnica T. Williams, Ph.D., is a board-certified licensed clinical psychologist, an Associate Professor in the University of Connecticut's Department of Psychological Sciences, and Clinical Director of the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Tolland, Connecticut. Her work is focused on improving cultural competence in the delivery of mental health care services and reducing barriers to care. She sits on the Advisory Board of the Chacruna Institute.

Marriage and Family Therapist | Behavioral Wellness Clinic

Sara Reed, MS, MFT, is a Marriage and Family Therapist at the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Tolland, Connecticut and a Study Therapist for the Psilocybin-assisted Psychotherapy for Major Depression initiative at Yale University. A member of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Advisory Board, Sara also served as a Sub-Investigator and Study Coordinator for MAPS' Phase 2 MDMA Clinical Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Indigenous and Latina Author

Anita Sanchez, Ph.D., an Indigenous and Latina author, trainer, and speaker passionate about visionary leadership, Indigenous wisdom, and the empowerment of women, works on a wide range of cultural transformation, diversity and inclusion projects. Anita, who serves on the boards of Bioneers and of the Pachamama Alliance, is also the internationally bestselling author of The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times.

Director | Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society

john a. powell is Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and Professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His many previous roles have included Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State; National Legal Director of the ACLU; and teaching at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia. His latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

Indigenous Climate Action | Executive Director and Co-Founder

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a Denesuline Indigenous activist, member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) of Alberta, Canada, is Executive Director and co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action (ICA), Canada’s premier Indigenous-led climate justice organization. Deranger, who previously spent 6 years building-up the highly successful international Indigenous Tar Sands campaign, has become widely known as one of the world’s most effective organizers and coalition builders to defend Indigenous people’s rights locally, nationally and globally.

Founder | The Bodhi Project

Sonali Sangeeta Balajee, former Senior Fellow at The Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley, is the founder of The Bodhi Project, which promotes practices at the intersection of Belonging, Organizing, Decolonizing, Health, and Interconnectedness. Sonali previously spent 13 years in government in Portland, OR, and also has 20 years’ experience in dance and music performance and 35 years’ practicing yoga and mindfulness.

Founder | Ripple Catalyst Studio

Cecile Lipworth, founder of Ripple Catalyst Studio and host of the weekly feminist radio show, Brave Space, consults with women-led organizations regionally and internationally, harnessing her expertise in movement building, event producing, fundraising, marketing and communications to support their work. Prior to founding Ripple, Cecile was for 15 years the Managing Director of V-Day, the renowned organization founded by Eve Ensler to combat gender-based violence.

Director | Earth Activist Training

Starhawk, an activist; leading eco-feminist thinker; documentary filmmaker; and permaculture designer, rancher and teacher; directs Earth Activist Training, which teaches a form of regenerative design grounded in both spirit and activism. She is the author of 13 books on earth-based spirituality and activism, including The Spiral Dance, The Earth Path, and The Empowerment Manual; as well as highly influential novels, including The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Executive Director | Women's Earth and Climate Action Network International

Osprey Orielle Lake, founder/Executive Director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, works with grassroots and Indigenous leaders, policy-makers and scientists to promote climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a clean energy future. Osprey serves on the Executive Committee of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, co-directs the DIVEST, INVEST, PROTECT campaign, and authored the award-winning, Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature. (wecaninternational.org)

Articulator of visions, dreams and symbols and spiritual counselor

Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe), a northern New Mexico-based mother of 5, born into the Diné (Navajo) Nation and later adopted by the Lakota Spiritual way of life, is a highly sought after articulator of visions, dreams and symbols and spiritual counselor who speaks and teaches extensively, nationally and internationally.

Author | Gaia Codex

Sarah Drew is the author of the popular eco-feminist novel, Gaia Codex, which describes how blueprints for our future can be informed by some of the deepest wisdom from our past. With a global social media following of 150,000±, Sarah has become a featured speaker at a wide range of venues.

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.