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Presenter Bio
About Queer Nature: Queer Nature is a project characterized by nature-based education & critical naturalist studies in Northwestern U.S. and Intermountain West. We dream into what queer ‘ancestral futurism’ and other alternatives to modernity could look like through mentorship in place-based skills with awareness of post-industrial/globalized/ecocidal contexts. Place-based skills include naturalist studies/interpretation, handcrafts, “survival skills,” and recognition of colonial and Indigenous histories of land and are framed in a container that emphasizes listening and relationship building with ecological systems and their inhabitants. We design and facilitate nature-based workshops and occasionally multi-day immersions mainly for LGBTQ2+ people (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Two-Spirit) and QT BI & POC (queer and trans Black and Indigenous folks and people of color). We carry the story and hope that these spaces create or revive narratives of belonging for folks who have often been made to feel that they biologically, socially, or culturally don’t belong—and inspire others to create similar spaces around the globe!
About Weaving Earth: Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education provides nature-based education for action at the confluence of ecological, social and personal systems change. We believe that education must critically engage inherited systems of separation and domination, and at the same time, responsibly recollect a deeper human inheritance: stories of interrelationship, belonging, dignity and respect. At the root of this deeper inheritance is the embodied remembering that humans are a part of nature, not apart from it. From this orientation, we work with youth, teens, adults, and organizations in the Bay Area and beyond to build a more just and resilient future.
Panelists:
Brontë Velez (Weaving Earth)
brontë’s work and rest is guided by the cosmology and promise of sabbath for black people and the land. brontë is a black-boricua transdisciplinary ritual artist, shepherd, curandere, educator, and wakeworker. their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the levity of absurdity.
the prayer of their life is to support safe and hilarious passage through climate collapse. they don’t know if we will get to the “other side” but are interested in the quality of care, attention and miracles we can receive and offer to each other and the earth on the present path. they care for the crossroads of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the earth through serving as creative director for Lead to Life ritual arts collective and adult programs director/educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth.
they are currently co-conjuring a film with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-steward of The School for Inclement Weather in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.
Tayla Shanaye (Weaving Earth)
tayla shanaye (she/they) is a living body engaged in somatic decolonial Black feminist scholarship, education and counseling. tayla has a master’s in somatic counseling psychology and a doctorate in women’s spirituality from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Currently, tayla provides somatically-oriented therapeutic containment for private clients, serves as a lead facilitator and co-director for Weaving Earth, facilitates organizational diversity, equity and access trainings, and teaches special topics in race, political somatic psychology, and liberation practice at the university level. they have authored several resources on somatics and personal-social transformation, including Nourishing the Nervous System (2024), Locate Your Liberate (2022), and Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices (2018).
tayla lives in the Anishinabeg territory of so-called Marquette, MI with their two young children, spouse, and dogs. When not engaged in scholarship, tayla is busy baking bread, skiing, and resting.
Visit embodytherevolution.com for more information.
Sophia (“So”) Sinopoulos-Lloyd (Queer Nature)
Presenter Bio: Sophia (“So”) Sinopoulos-Lloyd is a white queer Greek-American who grew up in the northern hardwood forests of Alnobak territory (central Vermont). So works variously as an outdoor educator, wilderness EMT, and writer. So worked as a seasonal shepherd throughout college and considers their life path to be deeply inspired by the combined resilience and tenderness of the cloven-hooved.
They founded Queer Nature with their spouse Pinar in 2015 where the two develop nature-based programming for LGBTQ2+ people with a focus on nature-connection, survival skills, and transformative experience through the lenses of decolonization and social and environmental justice. The soul of So’s work in and around nature is animated by studies of identity, place, notions of the sacred, and interspecies relationship within contexts of colonization, globalization, migration, and climate change. So holds an MA in Religious Studies from Claremont Graduate University and has studied place-based skills at Roots School and Wilderness Awareness School. Some of their favorite nature-connection practices are wildlife tracking and stealth-craft. @borealfaun @queernature
Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd (Queer Nature)
Presenter Bio: Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them) is an indigenous futurist, mentor, consultant and ecophilosopher; co-founder of Queer Nature, an “organism” stewarding earth-based queer community through ancestral skills, interspecies solidarity and rites of passage. Enchanted by the liminal, Pınar is an neurodivergent enby with Huanca, Turkish and Chinese lineages.
As a QTIBIPOC outdoor catalyst, their inspiration is envisioning decolonially-informed queer ancestral-futurism through interspecies accountability and the remediation of human exceptionalism in the Chthulucene. Their relationship with queerness, hybridity, neurodivergence, indigeneity and belonging guided their work in developing Queer Ecopsychology with a somatic and depth approach through a decolonial lens. As a survival skills mentor, one of their core missions is to uplift and amplify the brilliant “survival skills” that BIPOC, LGBTQ2SIA+ and other intersectional systemically targeted populations already have in their resilient bodies and stories of survivance. They are a member of Diversify Outdoors coalition. Follow their work on IG via @queerquechua + @queernature
Moderator: Shmee Giarratana, Director of Student Success at CIIS
Presentation Description
Join Weaving Earth and Queer Nature in an exploration of attention. Together, this panel will explore the holy and queer work of liberating and expanding awareness by recovering personal and collective attention. They will share perspectives on the liberatory possibilities of offering the sanctity of attention back to self and place in the midst of late-stage capitalism and collapse.
Relational Education and Activism
Join Weaving Earth and Queer Nature in an exploration of attention. Together, this panel will explore the holy and queer work of liberating and expanding awareness by recovering personal and collective attention. They will share perspectives on the liberatory possibilities of offering the sanctity of attention back to self and place in the midst of late-stage capitalism and collapse.
