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.

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.

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.

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.

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.