Speakers and Performers

ahlay is a Seattle-based singer-songwriter and community grief practitioner whose work explores more-than-human kinship, ancestral memory, and collective lament through participatory song and ritual. Rooted in Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk lineages, her practice brings together decolonial inquiry, depth psychology, and ecological devotion to address the entanglements of trauma, extraction, and ecological rupture, expressed through community singing projects including WAILS: Songs for Grief and Anthems for an Apocalypse.

Alex Lucitante (Cofán Indigenous People, Colombia and Ecuador) knows that many Indigenous peoples have been compelled to speak the language of the law in order to be heard. Yet he insists on another language as well: the ancestral science of yagé, which has guided his people for millennia and sustains their relationship with their territory. The Cofán, known as the People of Yagé, have woven their history around this sacred vine. Alex descends from a lineage that has safeguarded this knowledge and protected it deep within the forest. His mission is to ensure that this science does not fade—to keep it at the center of territorial defense and help future generations remember that yagé is alive and that she, too, speaks. A member of the Ceibo Alliance, an Indigenous coalition that unites various groups to protect their territories, rights, and cultures, Alex has felt a profound responsibility to protect his people's ancestral territory and the source of their culture and livelihoods.

Alexa Firmenich is an investor, consultant and facilitator focused on climate and biodiversity. She is  the founder of Naia Trust, an eco-centric investment vehicle that supports early stage nature-based solutions, scientific research and new economic models. She is also senior advisor at the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, and was co-director of its initiative SEED that is developing the world's most holistic measure of biodiversity with the goal to steer financial and political decision-makers to crystallise the value of nature into the global economy. Parallel to this work Alexa is trained as a group facilitator in leadership development and ecological pedagogy, designing multi-day learning journeys through her role at Leaders' Quest.  She is also an author, podcast host of Lifeworlds, a founding board member of Terra Habitus, a Mexican environmental fund that operates large-landscape conservation and watershed restoration, and a wilderness guide. 

Aperahama Edwards serves as Chairman of the Ngatiwai Trust Board, where he is dedicated to advancing the wellbeing and prosperity of his tribal nation, Ngatiwai. He is recognized across Aotearoa (New Zealand) as a strong leader in the revitalization of Indigenous language and cultural practices and holds several significant leadership roles: chair and spokesperson for the northern region of Te Matawai (the national Maori language revitalization body); co-chair of the National Iwi Chairs Forum cultural leadership group; and co-chair of Hinemoana Halo, an ocean conservation and resilience initiative.

Barnaby Steel is an artist and creative director of London-based experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. Barnaby’s art practice centers on the senses; enticing audiences into states of expanded perception, a space where the boundaries between bodies blur. His work is deeply rooted in scientific observation as a window that allows us to look through and beyond our own experience, to understand the complexities of things hidden from the naked eye. His work steps outside the human-centered worldview, exploring the threads that weave us into relationship with the more-than-human world.

César Rodríguez-Garavito is an Earth rights scholar, field lawyer, and the founding director of the More-Than-Human (MOTH) Life Program at NYU School of Law, where he serves as a Professor of Law and Director of the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Clinic. His work pioneers legal frameworks and advocacy for climate justice, Indigenous rights, and "more-than-human rights," a term he proposes for the rights of nature.

His ongoing MOTH initiatives include a partnership with Project CETI on the legal implications of AI-assisted translation of whale communication, collaborations with Indigenous leaders and communities of the Amazon and the Pacific Island nations to protect forest and ocean beings, and work with SPUN and the Fungi Foundation 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 (NYU, ed.), “What if We Understood What Animals are Saying?” (Ecology Law Quarterly, coauthor) and Climate Change on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action (Cambridge University Press).

Cosmo Sheldrake is a UK-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, live improviser, and field recordist. His first album The Much Much How How and I came out in 2018 on Transgressive Records. 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, a homage to the ocean. His latest album, Eye to the Ear was released in April 2024.

David Abram, a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David's work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. David was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of indigenous "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – a complex reassessment now underway in many disciplines.

In his first book, David coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity. Dr. Abram has received numerous awards, including Rockefeller and Watson fellowships, and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Co-founder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), David has held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo and was recently the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. He makes his home in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

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 decode 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.

Diana Obando (Bogotá, 1987) studied Political Science and Creative Writing at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She received the 2022 Elisa Mújica National Narrative Prize for her short story collection Erial (Laguna, 2023). She has led writing and collective-creation projects aimed at fostering historical memory and revitalizing relationships between people and the vegetal and mineral worlds. As a result, she founded La Juntanza, an interdisciplinary women's collective, with whom she co-authored the books Plantas de Ciudad (Himpar Editores, 2022) and Siete Plantas. Historias de la Gente sin Nombre (Himpar Editores, 2024). More than twenty years ago, she began working with oneironautics and with plants associated with dreaming. From this work emerged Noche, Noche, Noche, her first novel (Tusquets, 2025). She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Kate Raworth is an ecological economist and creator of the Doughnut—an economic concept that aims to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Her internationally best-selling book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist has been published in over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences, from the UN General Assembly and Pope Francis to David Attenborough and Extinction Rebellion. Kate is also co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab and Senior Teaching Fellow at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.

Merlin Sheldrake is a fungal biologist and author of Entangled Life, a million copy New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Merlin is a research associate at Oxford University and the VU Amsterdam, the UK Policy Lead for the Fungi Foundation, and Director of Impact for the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN).

Monica Gagliano, PhD, is an internationally award-winning research scientist, selected by Biohabitats as one of the 24 Most Inspiring Women of Ecology, alongside Jane Goodall and Rachel Carson. She pioneered plant bioacoustics, providing first experimental evidence that plants emit sounds and detect and respond to acoustic cues, and her research on plant learning and memory has expanded debates on cognition, subjectivity, and ethical and legal standing. Her work has been featured by The New York Times and The Guardian, among others. She is the author of Thus Spoke the Plant (2018) and The Mind of Plants (2021), and she was a 2025 Scholar-in-Residence at Harvard Divinity School. Monica is an Adjunct Research Associate Professor in Australia, a Fellow at the Center for Humans & Nature, and a member of the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, bridging Western and Indigenous science with plant wisdom to address planetary challenges. More at www.monicagagliano.com.

Patricia Gualinga is the International Relations Director for the Kichwa First People of Sarayaku. She is a human rights and land rights defender from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Throughout her life, Patricia has dedicated herself to protecting her community from human rights violations caused primarily by oil exploration and militarization. 

In 2012, she was a witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a landmark case filed in 2002 about the impacts of oil exploitation on her community, which concluded with the court ruling in favor of the Sarayaku people. In 2019, she received the Brote Activismo Medioambiental Award in Spain, in October 2021 the ALNOBA Courage and Leadership Award in the USA, in December 2021 the Al Moumin Human Rights Award, and recently the Olof Palme Human Rights Award 2022 for her leadership in the struggle to improve Indigenous living conditions. She currently supports and leads the Mujeres Amazónicas collective dedicated to the protection of the environment, Indigenous peoples, women’s rights, and land rights.

Robert Macfarlane is internationally recognized for his writing on nature, people and place. His books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness and, most recently, Is a River Alive?  His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge.

Modern Biology has brought 'plant music' to the masses. Originally educated as a biologist, veteran musician Tarun Nayar brings his passion for nature and sound together in an ambient project that is organismic, immediate, uplifting, and deeply contextual. He uses modular synthesis, home built synthesizers and other analog equipment to improvise with the natural vibrations of a certain place and time — via plant bioelectricity, latent electromagnetic radiation, and even the earth’s resonant hum. Trained from childhood in Indian classical music, he uses the system of Indian raga to mold his musical choices for time of day and season. His performances are an effort to bring the listener into the present moment through vibration, space, and connection.

His videos have been viewed over 100 million times and amassed him over 1 million followers online, and he has been featured by The Guardian, LA Times, BBC, Genius, Vice, The Verge, and DJ Mag among others. His recent albums have received editorial support on Spotify’s Music for Plants, Deep Listening, and Lava Lamp playlists. Recent live performances include Art Basel (Miami), MOCA (Los Angeles), New York Botanical Garden, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. 

Tarun is passionate about protecting wild places and has committed the lion's share of the proceeds of this project to supporting the natural world.

Suzanne Simard, PhD is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and leads the Mother Tree Project and Program. Her research—showing that forests are cooperative, connected networks—has revolutionized forest ecology. Her TED Talk has reached millions, and her bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree continues to capture global interest. Named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2024, she champions regenerative forestry rooted in Indigenous knowledge.

Vanessa Richards is a Vancouver-based transdisciplinary artist and facilitator. She holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Cardiff University, with work anthologized in landmark collections including Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (Arsenal Pulp Press), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (Penguin), Fire People: Black British Writers of the Contemporary Era (Chatto & Windus), and Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (John Wiley & Sons). She has served as a Cultural Planner with the City of Vancouver, shaping cultural strategy and equity-driven initiatives. Her perspectives appear in Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change (Routledge) by Kari Grain and A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (ECW Press) by Seth Klein.