Barry Threw

Barry Threw is curator, technologist, designer, cultural producer & strategist with over 15 years of experience developing innovative & influential platforms, products, teams, and businesses across art, built environments, and experiential & immersive media. He served on the Executive Steering Committee for Arts and Technology for the Vatican, an advisory group for the Vatican Secretariat of Communications, and was a core contributor to its strategic plan. He is Cofounder of Fabricatorz, Director of #NEWPALMYRA, on the Board of Gray Area and is based in San Francisco, CA.

Dr. Gillean Denny [ARISE]

Originally from Philadelphia, USA, Gillean completed her PhD in Architecture at the University of Cambridge. With a background in production and graphic design, sustainable grass-roots architecture, and teaching, Gillean currently works internationally from Toronto, Canada, as a designer and writer. She has several publications in the area of urban planning which explore the environmental effects of Urban Agriculture and global food chains on society. Amid other projects, she is currently working on a novelization of these themes for a children’s audience.

Robin Ladouceur 
Communications Director

Robin brings her passion and enthusiasm for forging and nurturing professional relationships to her role of Communications Director. Upon completing a PhD in Russian Literature, Robin worked in instructional technology/design, communications, and higher education administration for 12 years. She is a creative, results-oriented communicator, social media strategist, digital storyteller & avowed technophile. Robin takes pride in being a passionate trainer and presenter. She thrives on developing the talents and visions of others. Outside of work, Robin spends her time birding, hiking with her dogs and friends, throwing pots on a wheel, and taking tons, literally tons, of nature photographs!

Marion Belanger [ARISE]
Resident Photographer 

Marion Belanger photographs the cultural landscape, particularly where geology and the built environment intersect.   She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the contested landscape of the Everglades. Rather than focusing only on the wetlands in the protected National Park, she ventured into the now drained swampland of the historic Everglades, where housing developments, sugarcane fields, and water control structures occupy the landscape. For Rift/ Fault Belanger photographed the two land-based edges of the North American Continental Plate, along the San Andreas Fault in California, and the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland.

The artist earned a M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art where she was the recipient of both the John Ferguson Weir Award and the Schickle-Collingwood Prize, and a B.F.A. from the College of Art & Design at Alfred University. She has been an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Arts, Everglades National Park, and MASS MoCA.  Her work is shown internationally, and her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery for Art, the Library of Congress, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her exhibitions include Photography and America’s National Parks, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Internationale Fototage: Contemporary American Photography, Mannheim, Germany; Northern (L) Attitudes: Norwegian and American Contemporary Art, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY; and Both Sides of the Street: Celebrating the Corcoran’s Photography Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, among others.

She is a current honoree for the 2017 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography.  The artist is the author of Everglades: Outside and Within, with an essay by Susan Orlean (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009), and Rift/ Fault, with an essay by Lucy Lippard (Radius Books, 2016).  The artist resides in Guilford, Connecticut. She teaches at the Hartford Art School, and in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University.

Jon Mrowczynski
Services and Projects Lead

Physicist by day, computer scientist by night. Jon Mrowczynski is a highly dedicated problem solver, challenge seeker, and tech zealot. He has written software to assist with the analysis of particle collisions at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, redeveloped a wearable, wireless medical technology from scratch to improve physical therapy for Parkinson’s disease sufferers, and designed an AI that determines people’s emotional states based on their facial expressions. On his time off, he enjoys optimizing complex systems, automating menial tasks, upgrading existing technology, and playing his oboe.

Debra Burhans
Services and Projects Lead

Debra Burhans is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Canisius College.  She has over 30 years of experience in data modeling, data extraction, and software development. Her areas of current research include bioinformatics data analysis, technology ethics, analysis of sensor data in real-time, and the integration of art and technology. Dr. Burhans has served as the Academic Mentor for an inner-city high-school STEP Program in Buffalo for the past 15 years.

Liz Hannah

Liz Hanna (MA, MT-BC) is a singer, composer, music therapist, and writer specializing in interweaving creative and contemplative practices to facilitate relational wellbeing. A graduate of Berklee College of Music (Music Therapy) and Yale Divinity School (Religion & Ecology), Liz integrates experience in performance, clinical work, sacred music, and contemplative ecology to explore mutuality, healing, and spiritual life. With a particular focus on reconciliation, Liz’s work aims to help reawaken a more holistic sense not only of human interdependence with all life, but of the human capacity to co-create restorative relationship. In addition to administrative and collaborative work with GoodLands, Liz sings professionally in the tri-state area, teaches private lessons, and serves as Spiritual Programs and Retreats Coordinator for Kairos Earth, facilitating workshops in contemplative ecology.

Tayler Schweigel
Services and Projects Lead

Tayler Schweigel holds a BS (University of Rochester) and MS (University at Buffalo) in Geological Science.  The first year of her master’s program was spent in Italy at the Universita degli Studi di Milano Bicocca. As a geology student she digitized published data from older maps, checking for inconsistencies and creating a repository of structural, sedimentological, and core data that she used to update structural domains related to the tectonic history of the Mohawk Valley. The presentation of her graduate research won the 2015 Outstanding Graduate Poster prize at the Northeastern section meeting of the Geological Society of America and the top prize at the 2017 Buffalo Association of Professional Geologists student poster competition.  Tayler has been involved in outreach activities to engage elementary and middle school students in the study of geology and science in general.

As part of her involvement in citizen science projects, Tayler is a volunteer with Buffalo-Niagara Waterkeeper’s Riverwatch program In addition to working with Goodlands, Tayler is a volleyball coach in the Buffalo Public Schools

Elias Crim

Elias Crim is the founder and publisher at Solidarity Hall, a group blog focused on community regeneration. He was a founding board member of the Lumen Christi Institute (University of Chicago) and New City Press (Focolare–U.S.). He has served in management positions at the Chicago Board of Trade, Accenture, and with several dot-com startups.

Annie Cheng

Annie Cheng is a junior at Yale University studying Political Science and Ethnicity, Race and Migration. She is devoted to environmental justice with a focus on food justice as it concerns intersectional global populations. ARISE is her first project connecting love of art and earth together. In her free time, she travels, volunteers, visits art museums and explores new recipes.

Board

Stephen Thor Johnston
VP North American Land Trust

Stephen M. Ervin is Assistant Dean for Information Technology at the Harvard Design School, Director of Computer Resources, and lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His current interests include Geodesign, innovation in digitally enabled design teaching and learning, and algorithmic design. He is a pioneer in applications of computing in landscape architecture, planning and design.

Rosanne Haggerty
CEO Community Solutions

Rosanne Haggerty is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Community Solutions. She is an internationally recognized leader in developing innovative strategies to end homelessness and strengthen communities. In 1990, Rosanne founded Common Ground Community, a pioneer in the development of supportive housing and research-based practices that end homelessness.

To have greater impact, she and her senior team launched Community Solutions in 2011 to help communities solve the problems that create and sustain homelessness. Rosanne is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Ashoka Senior Fellow and Hunt Alternative Fund Prime Mover. In 2012, she was awarded the Jane Jacobs medal for New Ideas and Activism from the Rockefeller Foundation. She serves on the boards of the Alliance for Veterans, Citizens Housing and Planning Council and Iraq-Afghanistan Veterans of America. She is a Life Trustee of Amherst College.

Paul Hellmund
Ecological Design/Greenway Expert

Paul Cawood Hellmund is principal and president of Hellmund Associates. He is an ecological designer and conservation planner with more than thirty years of professional experience. A Harvard-educated landscape architect and planner, he was born and raised in the Republic of Panama. He is an experienced facilitator, speaker, and writer on sustainability, conservation, and ecological design topics

. For ten years he was president of the Conway School in Massachusetts and director of its graduate program in sustainable landscape planning and design. He currently serves as Visiting Fellow at the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University.