Jeanette Hart-Mann is a farmer, artist, activist and teacher committed to the transformative potential of traditional ecological knowledge, embodied land-based practices, creative engagement and more-than-human-relationships. Her current research is focused on food and environmental justice, as well as vegetal philosophies and plant communication in conjunction with healing practices. Her methodologies are iterative, emergent and interdisciplinary. She weaves farming, wild crafting, and ecological restoration with video, sculpture, photography, installation, and writing. Hart-Mann is Co-Founder and Co-Director of SeedBroadcast, an artist collective committed to uplifting the culture in agri-Culture through creative public engagement and open-source seed sharing. SeedBroadcast is the recipient of multiple grants from Kindle Project, McCune Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation – Climate Change Solutions Fund Grant, and Puffin Foundation. She is lead farmer, seed steward, and shepherdess of HawkMoth Farm + Agroecology Center where she is designing and implementing experimental climate-resilient high-desert polycultures through integrative plant, animal, soil, and human habitation while producing food for regional communities. Hart-Mann received her BFA, summa cum laude and University Honors, summa cum laude at The University of New Mexico and her MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently serves as Director of the Land Arts of the American West program and Assistant Professor in Art & Ecology at UNM.

Ryan Henel is the Field Coordinator for the University of New Mexico’s Land Arts of the American West program and a Research Lecturer III for the Art + Ecology Department. He is also a Lead Artist for the Harwood Art Center’s Art and Social Justice Apprenticeship, which employs high-school and college students to design and fabricate works of public art. Ryan has an MFA in Art + Ecology and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. He received the Land Arts Mobile Research Center’s Post-MFA Grant funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation to develop case studies that integrated land art into public infrastructure. Ryan is a practicing artist who develops site-specific public artworks and temporary installations that use perspective, patterns and scale to prompt the viewer to experience a different understanding of their relationship to an environment. His most recent work focuses on public artworks that incorporate principles of biophilic design, green infrastructure and habitat creation.

Subhankar Banerjee is an artist, writer, conservationist and public scholar. His place-based and community-engaged interdisciplinary and intersectional efforts aim to advance multispecies justice to mitigate the intensifying biodiversity and the climate crises. He works closely with Indigenous Gwich’in and Iñupiat community members and environmental organizations to defend significant biological nurseries from oil and gas development in Arctic Alaska, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Coeditor (with T.J. Demos and Emily Eliza Scott) of Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change (Routledge, February 2021), Subhankar was most recently cohost (with U.S. Senator Tom Udall) of the UNM Biodiversity Webinar Series (Fall 2020), cocurator (with Josie Lopez) of Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande (Fall 2019), and convener of the last oil: a multispecies justice symposium (February 2018). His photographs have been exhibited in more than fifty museum exhibitions around the world, including Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment at the Princeton University Art Museum (2018-2019) and the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations (2012); and public and scholarly writing have appeared in many publications, including Global Photography: A Critical History (Routledge, 2020) and Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (Routledge, 2017). For his conservation efforts, Subhankar received a Greenleaf Artist Award from the United Nations Environment Programme, a Cultural Freedom Award from Lannan Foundation, a National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, a Special Achievement Award from the Sierra Club, and was named an Arctic Hero by the Alaska Wilderness League. Subhankar is the founding director of both the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities in the Department of Art and the Species in Peril project at UNM.

Bill Gilbert is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Lannan Endowed Chair, University of New Mexico, where he co-founded the Art & Ecology area and created the Land Arts of the American West program with support from Lannan Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Gilbert developed the Land Arts of the American West field program and the Land Arts Mobile Research Center to focus on art generated in response to the environments and communities of the southwest. He served as Director of LAAW and LAMRC from 2000-2016. The Art and Ecology area in the Department of Art and Art History has built an interdisciplinary curriculum and a Master of Fine Arts focused on the Arts role in contemporary Ecological thought and practice.

From 1990-2000 Gilbert served as head of Ceramics at UNM. His involvement in developing the curriculum included work with Indigenous artists from Acoma Pueblo and Pastaza, Ecuador and Mestizo artists from Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico. He has curated numerous exhibitions and written extensively on the topic of Indigenous ceramics practices in the Americas.

Gilbert is author of two books, Land Arts of the American West and Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: art in community and environment, both of which address the need to update the curriculum in tertiary level art education to prepare students to contribute to the changing world they enter upon graduation.

He previously directed Portrait In Place, 2013-2016, a project generated at Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, WY and presented at Ucross, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science and Lannan Foundation. The interdisciplinary team assembled at Ucross included artists from Land Arts of the American West and scientists from Yale University and the University of Wyoming.