Amy Balkin's projects and collaborations combine participation, action, and documentation to create large-scale, public, and long-term works exploring the intersections of ecology, law, and politics. Her frequently public or participatory works have been exhibited widely, including in Con los pies en la Tierra (CAAM), Anthropocene Monument (les Abbatoirs), Rights of Nature(Nottingham Contemporary), and dOCUMENTA (13), and written on in Decolonizing Nature (Sternberg), Art in the Anthropocene (OAPEN), and Critical Landscapes (UC Press). She is an associate professor who has taught at California College of the Arts and Stanford. She received her MFA from Stanford and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in San Francisco.
Rwaida Gharib is pursuing her PhD in environment and resources at the Stanford School of Sustainability. Her research focuses on environmental justice and the policy changes/financing needed to support the climate adaptation and resilience of vulnerable populations—specifically, those living in rural poverty, women and girls, and im/migrants/refugees. Rwaida has worked in humanitarian aid and international development for more than 15 years, serving as an advisor to the World Bank Group, UN Development Programme (UNDP), and as a presidential appointee for the Obama Administration in various capacities.
Janet Alison Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015), The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), and Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (1998). She is the contributing editor of four books: Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (with Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2014), Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996), A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (1999) and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (2001). She served as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (a division of the American Anthropological Association) from 2011-13, and has produced three ethnographic documentaries, including “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California” and “Horses of Life and Death: The Pasola on Sumba”.
Shayla Monroe received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archaeology of African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzes the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Askut (c. 1850 – 1550 BC) and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists. Monroe earned her M.A. in Anthropology from UCSB in 2015. Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in Anthropology and English (2012). She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L’Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland.
Teraya Paramehta is an Assistant Professor of English at Universitas Indonesia. Born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, she received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity and a Graduate Certificate in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California in 2024. Her ethnographic film titled Beyond Paradise, based on her dissertation research in Bali, will premiere in the Fall of 2024. As a vocalist, lyricist, and musician with two co-authored independent albums, she co-foundedMari Jeung Rebut Kembali, a Jakarta-based feminist collective that utilizes popular, creative, and alternative culture to raise awareness of sexual and gender-based violence in Indonesia.
Emily Pecore is a Bay Area-based high school student interested in biology, environmental justice, and youth activism. She currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit (BAYCS), a place-based, entirely youth-led organization focused on environmental literacy, advocacy, and education for high school students. Additionally, she interns with PhD candidate Rwaida Gharib, researching climate migration through the lens of policy modeling.
Dora Rodriguez is the Director of Salvavision, a non-profit organization that provides aid and support to migrants, refugees, and returnees.
Ana Sanchez-Bachman is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at SUNY Binghamton, studying the intersections between climate change and migration on the Arizona-Sonora border, with comparative work carried out in Guatemala. Ana has also been involved in organizing work with several humanitarian aid organizations in the Arizona borderlands since 2016. More recently, Ana has worked with the Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls at SUNY Binghamton on collaborative projects that assess national policies on climate change adaptation and mitigation, and whether these policies address the ways that climate change disproportionately affects women. This has included support on workshops informing national climate policy in Guatemala, which has informed their dissertation work. Ana is also a member of the Arizona SAR Report working group, which gathers information from Search and Rescue/Recovery groups working in the U.S-Mexico borderlands, to document their ongoing work, provide a platform for groups to work together, and stay informed on each group's activities. They split their time between Binghamton, New York and Ajo, Arizona– their primary field site.
Anneli Skaar (b. 1969) is a Norwegian-American artist and award-winning designer who lives in Camden, Maine. Primarily a painter, she also works in a variety of mediums from fine press techniques to pen and ink in order to create limited edition artist books. Her work is found in national museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peabody Essex Museum, and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, as well as libraries such as the United Nations Library in Geneva, The Fram Museum in Norway, and the U.S. Library of Congress Special Collections.