Speakers & Performers
Andrew C. Revkin
is an environmental journalist, educator, and author. He has written on climate change for over thirty years, mostly for The New York Times. Andrew has held positions at National Geographic and Discover Magazine and won top awards in science journalism, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship. His published work includes The Burning Season and The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.
He was also the Founding Director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute. Finally, Andrew is a lifelong musician and performing songwriter.
César Rodríguez-Garavito
is an Earth rights scholar, field lawyer, and founding director of the More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Program at NYU School of Law. He is a Professor of Clinical Law and Director of the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Clinic at NYU Law. His work has advanced new ideas and legal actions on issues such as climate justice, Indigenous rights, and what he proposes to call “more-than-human rights” (rights of nature).
His ongoing MOTH initiatives include a partnership with Project CETI on the legal implications of AI-assisted translation of sperm whale communication as well as collaborations with the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks on legal actions to protect the fungal kingdom of life. His recent publications include More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing (ed.), and Climate Change on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action (forthcoming).
Christine Winter
is Senior Lecturer in environmental, climate change, multispecies and indigenous politics. Her research focuses on the ways in which academic political theory, and particularly theories of justice, continue to perpetuate injustice for some people (and more specifically for Māori) and the environment. Her most recent research centers on ensuring the emerging field of a political theory of multispecies justice should have decolonial (and anticolonial) foundations.
Cosmo Sheldrake
is a UK-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, live improviser, and field recordist. His music ranges widely from celebratory anthems to soulful elegies to riotous party numbers, to sparse electronic production, to haunting polyphonic songs that have grown out of field recordings of birds, whales, fish, frogs, and fungi, and more. Running through all his work is a belief that the living world is a noisy and musical place with the power to change how we think, feel, and imagine. Together with his human and nonhuman collaborators, Cosmo creates music that speaks to the urgency and possibility of our times. Cosmo has toured internationally with sold-out headline shows across North America, Europe, and Japan. He has composed music for both film and theatre and, in 2015, ran a community choir in Brighton, UK.
In 2020, he released Wake Up Calls on his label Tardigrade Records, featuring tracks composed entirely from recordings of endangered British birds. In 2023, Cosmo released Wild Wet World, an EP that is an homage to the ocean. His new album, Eye to the Ear was released on April 12th 2024.
David Gruber
is the Founder & President of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit organization and interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative that is applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art gentle robotics to translate the communication of sperm whales. CETI has partnered with MOTH on an endeavor to explore the legal opportunities and risks of AI-assisted translations of the language of whales and other species. Gruber is Distinguished Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York & The CUNY Graduate Center. His research bridges animal communication, climate science, marine biology, microbiology, and molecular biology, and his inventions include technology to perceive the underwater world from the perspective of marine animals (including a “shark-eye camera”). His long-standing collaboration with the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory has led to the engineering of some of the gentlest and minimally invasive robots to better understand and interact with life in the ocean.
Dylan McGarry
(PhD) (Pronouns: He, They, Dyl) works across the fields of education, ecology, and the arts. As such, Dyl works with several tentacles touching the world, as an Educational Sociologist, Political Ecologist, multi-media artist, theatre- and film-maker. Dyl has a transdisciplinary PhD in Environmental Education at the Environmental Learning Research Centre, Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the co-founder of the public storytelling foundation Empatheatre and works with public storytelling as a mechanism for healing, empathy, meaning-making and fostering inclusive forms of governance in complex social-ecological entanglements. Their areas of research span a wide spectrum, including transgressive social learning, public pedagogy, theatre-based Research, arts-based research, visual anthropology, legal anthropology, queer eco-pedagogy, post-humanism, new materialism, and critical African feminist approaches to co-engaged research. Dyl is most interested in the profound role of connective aesthetics, social sculpture, and 'making' as essential forms of thinking and theorizing, what he likes to call “meaning ∞ making.
Elena Landinez
is a Latin American visual artist. Her practice explores the relationship between the human and more-than-human world. Marked and inspired by the movement of water and dreams, Elena relies on her imagination to create collections, drawings, writings, photographs, and paintings. Her poetic work calls us to think of new paths, to dream and invent other stories.
Currently, she is the MOTH’s Art Fellow at the NYU Center for Human Rights. Originally from Barranquilla, Colombia, she lives in Salvador, Brazil.
Eliana Hernández-Pachón
is a writer and educator from Bogotá, Colombia. She has an M.F. A. in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from Cornell University. Her book La Mata (in English, The Brush) won the National Award of Poetry in Colombia in 2020. She is the co-author of Plantas del camino, a book on weeds and healing, and edited the anthology Un florero que se rompe/A Vase that Shatters, which features short stories and poems by members of the Truth Commission of Colombia. She is part of Como un Lugar, a poetry collective that runs an independent press in Buenos Aires and organizes a Latin American poetry festival in NYC.
Elisa Morgera
is the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights. She is Professor of Global Environmental Law at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (UK) and Adjunct Professor in International and European Union Environmental Law at the University of Eastern Finland. From 2019 to 2024, she was the director of the One Ocean Hub, a Global North/South research collaboration on human rights and the ocean, which connected natural and social scientists, legal experts, artists, and human rights holders and defenders to support fair, inclusive, and transformative decision-making. Previously, she worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Development Programme in the Eastern Caribbean. In various capacities, she has advised governments and civil society in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.
Erin Robinsong
is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Rag Cosmology (2017) and Wet Dream (2022), both winners of the AM Klein Prize for Poetry. A PhD candidate at Concordia University (Montreal), Erin’s research-creation work focuses on regenerative, relational, and embodied poetics. Her performances include Zone of Exaggerated Dreaming, a solo work set in the abyssal ocean, and collaborative works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller, including This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Erin grew up in Coast Salish territory, on Cortes Island, Canada.
Eulalia Yagarí
is co-founder of the Indigenous Organization of Antioquia (OIA), Embera Waunaan Organization of Choco (OREWA), and the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC). She was a member of the Departmental Assembly of Antioquia for 14 years, where she promoted the approval of Ordinance 032 of 2004 which created the public policy of indigenous peoples in the Department of Antioquia. She also helped to create the gender mainstreaming policy and other ordinances related to the development of Antioquia.
Eulalia is also an international lecturer on Indigenous issues in Colombia and abroad, and was named by Semana Magazine in 2005 as one of the 100 most important women in the history of Colombia. She has also received numerous other awards and recognitions, including the 1997 IX CAFAM Award for Woman of the Year in Colombia and COMFAMA’s 1994 Distinguished as Woman of the Year.
Eulalia is also a poet, composer, and singer-songwriter. Her album “conjuro de jais” is an elaboration of poetry and songs that relate the cosmogony, struggles, and resistances of the Emberá people of Colombia.
Fátima Vélez
was born in volcanic land. She is a story-teller, professor, PhD candidate, and cultural producer. Fátima has published the collection of poems Casa Paterna, Del Porno y las babosas, Diseño de Interiores, and the novels Galápagos and Jardín en Tierra Fría. She is part of Como un Lugar, a collective of Latin American poets based in NYC.
Genevieve Guenther
is the founding director of End Climate Silence and the author of The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which Publishers Weekly calls "a revelatory study" and Bill McKibben has called "a gift to the world." Dr. Guenther advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on climate disinformation and communication. She also serves as Expert Reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and she has spoken about climate change and language in The New Yorker and on CNN as well as to audiences at Duke, Columbia, and Harvard, among other universities.
Jonathan Watts
is an author and journalist based in the Amazon rainforest. He is global environment editor for The Guardian and founder of the Rainforest Journalism Fund and Sumaúma.com.
A veteran foreign correspondent previously based in Tokyo, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, Jonathan covered two tsunamis, three earthquakes, one cyclone, two bombings, a G8 conference, two world cups, and three Olympics and interviewed numerous state leaders. He switched to full time environmental reporting while writing the eco-travelogue, When a Billion Chinese Jump. He more recently wrote a biography of the brilliant natural scientist who conceived the Gaia Theory of the Earth as a living organism: The Many Lives of James Lovelock.
José María Gualinga
Originally from Sarayaku, José María Gualinga is a charismatic leader of the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku. José served as the Tayak Apu (president) from 2011 to 2014. Currently, he is a member of the Political Advisory Council of the Sarayaku Government Council and the Coordinator of the Strategic Plan to Implement the Kawsak Sacha-Living Jungle Declaration.
During the 1990s, José was the representative in Europe of the Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP). He is the author of the Sisa Ñampi Plan (Camino de Flores or Frontera de Vida) and co-editor of several documentaries, including Black Blood and The Song of the Flower.
He participated in the creation of the Kindy Challwa (Canoe of Life), which is exhibited at the Museum of Man in Paris.
José is also the author and philosophical intellectual behind the proposal for the Kawsak Sacha-Living Forest Declaration, approved in 2014 by the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku, launched globally in 2015 at COP21 in Paris, and declared in 2018 in Quito. José is also a key member of the ICCA Consortium in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Merlin Sheldrake
is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. He is the presenter of Fungi: Web of Life, a giant screen documentary narrated by Björk.
Merlin is an honorary research associate of the University of Oxford and a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation.
Shaunak Sen
is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. He recently directed All That Breathes, winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Eye award for the best documentary at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won six international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018) and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen and other journals.