Speaker Bios 2020
Mariana Aravales
Born in Argentina, Mariana began her path as a curandera through the study of plants. Since youth, she has walked the capaq ñam of life. A friend of Mayantuyacu, she has created the first system of Andean Amazonian floral spirituality through mystical waters and flowers of knowledge under the name “Curanderita esencias chamanicas de Perú.”
She participates within the acllahuasi (ancestral femininity of the Tawantinsuyu) and offers training circles in ancestral flower therapy. The energetic emanations of the sacred flowers are a subtle and transpersonal form of mother medicines, accessible to all people, and it maintains the spiritual foundations of healing within the Andean-Amazonian worldview.
All mother medicines, from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska -Abya Yala-, must continue to be spread by all possibilities, for the good of humanity and the generations that are coming.
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Capaq ñam: the Tahuantinsuyu Road Network, a system of roads of enormous distances, which linked the important cities of the coast and the mountains.
Acllahuasi: Quechua word that means house of the chosen ones.
Tawantinsuyu: the Inca referred to their empire as Tawantinsuyu.
Abya Yala: term used by some indigenous peoples of North and South America to describe the two continents.
William Padilla Brown
Founder of MycoSymbiotics, William Padilla-Brown is a social entrepreneur, citizen scientist, mycologist, amateur ‘phychologist’, urban shaman, writer, you-tube vlogger, contributing editor for Fungi mag, researcher, poet, and father. William holds Permaculture Design Certificates acquired through Susquehanna Permaculture and NGOZI. William is leading the country in the field of Cordyceps cultivation. William regularly teaches at mushrooms clubs around the country, festivals, Agricultural conferences, and more.
Magenta has been an organizer with Bloom since 2010 and serves as the network’s ECO (executive creative officer, a feminist play on the role of CEO). She also consults other networks and startups as an organizational development consultant focused on regenerative business. She’s passionate about decentralizing power to support healthy, regionally anchored economies. This year she was recognized as among the Top 100 Marketing & Advertising Leaders by MADcon. Through her work with Bloom, she has been listening to grassroots movement leaders from all over the world, to craft governance approaches that rebalance humanity’s relationship with Earth and each other.
Monica Gagliono
Monica Gagliano is a research associate professor in evolutionary ecology and former fellow of the Australian Research Council. She is currently based at Southern Cross University, where she directs the BI Lab–Biological Intelligence Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Though she began her career by studying animal behavior, she quickly turned her attention to plant behavior and cognition. Over the last decade, she has blazed the trail for a brand new field called plant bioacoustics, showing that plants do make sounds; and by demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, she has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. Her studies have led her to author numerous groundbreaking scientific articles and to co-edit The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lexington Books, 2015), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 2017) and Memory and Learning in Plants (Springer, 2018). Her research transcends the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism and encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. In her latest book, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018), which she calls a “phytobiography”, she describes her experiments that opened the space to begin to understand how to make contact with this other-than-human intelligence. More info: www.monicagagliano.com
Lexi Gropper
Lexie Gropper is a biologist dedicated to deepening her understanding of
the life cycles, with a passion for the processes of decomposition leading
to fertile grounds and new opportunities. She dedicates her energy to the
cultivation of plants, fungi, bacteria, relationships, community, and
healing in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Jasmin Pirozek
Jazmin is of Kinosao Sipi, Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba and lives in
Kenora, Ontario. She is a student of Maestro Juan Flores, a Plant Medicine
Teacher of the Peruvian Amazon. Jazmin has received her Master’s degree in
Biology, focussing on Boreal Forest Ethnobotany, as well, she is a graduate of Boreal Forest Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology. Jazmin has travelled across Canada to share her knowledge, as well as to the United Kingdom to present at Breaking Convention 2019. She assisted in writing Science North’s Planetarium film “Under the Same Stars: Minwaadiziwin”, including narration and singing for the piece. Jazmin shares her knowledge of Boreal forest medicines, continually working with Indigenous people of Northern Ontario. Currently, Jazmin works as a consultant with a Tribal council and a Community Organization teaching knowledge that promotes well-being, healing and self-knowing. The construction of her Healing Centre, located on Lake of the Woods, begins in 2021.
Daniel Shankin
Mariya Shcheglovitova
Mariya Shcheglovitova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. She completed her PhD in Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in May 2020. Mariya's research has investigated how urban sustainability practices intersect with and reproduce racial inequalities. During her PhD Mariya was involved in activism for housing justice and still thinks of Baltimore as home.
BioMICAns
An interdisciplinary team of friends and former student peers united together by the pursuit of advancing equity and environmentalism. Eesha Patne (Product Designer, India), Eunsoo Kim (Graphic Designer, South Korea), Hanah Murphy (Food System Designer, USA), Judy Chen (Landscape Architect, Taiwan), and Sasha Avrutina (Graphic Designer, USA) have completed their M.A. in Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). During their time in the program they participated in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. Biomimicry is the practice of looking to nature to solve human problems. Through merging their human-centered practice with biomimicry principles they were able to form their own unique design practice based in “life-centered design”.
Esteban Yepes Montoya
Esteban Yepes Montoya a.k.a Doula Kajim is a Two-Spirit multidisciplinary artist, fermentation revivalist, dharma pilgrim and self-taught researcher on: ethnobotany + regenerative nourishment and Meta-Shamanism.
Esteban is a Certified Health Coach at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in New York.
He/She is an ¨Excommunicate¨ and ¨Not graduated¨ CHEF from the Basque Culinary Center where he studied ¨Gastronomical Sciences & Culinary Arts¨ before starting his journey into the empirical botanical research.
His/hers investigations are trans-disciplinary, oriented towards a non-dualistic & holistic-integrative approach; has dedicated the last years of his life to the rigorous study of the therapeutic benefits, ethno-medicinal applications and ancient sacred/ritual uses of Cacao and Chocolate in south, central and North America.
He/She has shared his/hers cutting edge research and findings on Cacao, ethnobotany and fermented foods at international conferences, gatherings & educational institutions such as: “Arizona Psychedelic Conference” in Phoenix, Universidad del Rosario in Bogota, “Sacred Plants of the Americas Congress” in Chapala, “Anahuac – Diego Rivera Museum” in Mexico City, The Oaxaca Fermentation Summit; among others.¨