WORKER MEMBERS
VICTORIA MARIA MOYER
VICTORIA wears or has worn many hats in a diversity of fields, including: eco-somatic research and practice, landscaping, plant growing and tending, education (arts and nature-connection), somatics and therapeutic support, holistic psychiatric care, theatre and dance, and probably a few others. She also studies herbal medicinal practices and can often be found researching botany, ethnobotany, fire ecology, and a slew of other ecological topics. Although it is impossible to pick favorites, her favorite plant friend and teacher at the time of writing is Stoneroot ("Collinsonia canadensis").
BEN KESSLER
BEN is or was a schoolteacher, biologist, writer, landscaper, and nurseryman. He used to work with birds who eat mammals who eat plants, and so became involved in botany by process of elimination. Ben lives in a hollow in Nelson County where the water is sweet.
ADVISORY CIRCLE
SARAH GEROME
SARAH grew up in the Shenandoah Valley and visits often to tend her family land. She lives in Charlottesville and owns and operates Hillside School, a home-based preschool. Along with seed-collecting, gardening and rambling walks, her greatest pleasure is sharing her love of the outdoors with her granddaughters.
HYPERION YVAIRE
ROSETTA GOINES
TAYLOR HANIGOSKY
TAYLOR is a place-based interdisciplinary artist and thicket-dweller who engages a multi-dimensional practice of active listening, tactile exploration, cooking, growing, research, play, repetition, and commitment that seeks to re-integrate and re-imagine the human and the environment. Currently, Taylor tangles methods of felt-making, seed saving, weaving, improvisational movement, performance, storytelling, and foraging to learn from and ally with feral places and creatures that offer alternative perspectives on human control over the trajectory of landscapes. Collaboration and participation are important methods of experimentation that push the possibilities of the artist’s practice. As such, she engages a variety of workshops, dialogues, and interactions with human and non-human communities alike, especially through her land-based community building project, Wild Altar. Her work remains devotional and in service to a wildly alive, multi-species co-conspiracy to compost extractive empires into new paradigms.