Philip (he/him) grew up on a boat yard in Georgetown Maine. He learned to philosophize in that salty mix of lobstermen pragmatists and back to the lander idealists. After painting the bottom of many a boat, he took his questions on the road: to liberation theology base camps in Nicaragua, ashrams in India and monasteries in Greece. He settled down at Harvard Divinity School where he completed his doctoral work in religion. He completed a postdoc at UPenn and professorships at Carleton College and Manhattan College before returning to his home state as Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at UMaine Farmington. His book, When Art Disrupts Religion, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Contact: philip.francis@seguinlandinstitute.org

Marsha (she/her) is a designer, artist, educator and graphic facilitator. Her teaching and design work are shaped by her studies at Brown University in Art Semiotics, Modern Culture & Media; by the experience of founding film collectives in New York City; by her training at Boston University in group dynamics and clinical social work; by her work as founder and designer of Seguin Tree Dwellings in Maine; and by more than 20 years of work as a graphic facilitator for organizations ranging from the MIT Media Lab to the United Nations.

She loves helping students to rediscover their creative instincts and expand their creative capacities.

marsha.dunn@seguinlandinstitute.org

Matt (he/him) is committed to supporting the meaningful growth of young people. Matt is a licensed school counselor who spent 13 years at Boston College High School in Dorchester, Massachusetts providing college and guidance counseling. Prior to working at BC High, Matt spent close to a decade working with teens in both teaching and counseling capacities. His work included teaching at a high-school in Honduras, serving as Senior Field Staff at a wilderness-focused therapy program, and co-leading a Dept of Education grant-funded initiative “Year 13” focused on providing educational and career counseling to struggling high-school age students. He received his Masters in Education from Boston University.

matt.weeman@seguinlandinstitute.org

Elin (she/her) is passionate about experiential and place-based education and building community. She spent a decade as Associate Director and Art Teacher at Community Schools, a recreational program run by Cambridge DHS in partnership with the Cambridge Public School System. Prior to this, she taught at-risk youth through hands-on programming at Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center, worked as Senior Field Staff at a wilderness therapeutic program for teens, and spent time teaching in Peru. Her commitment to community building has led her to found two programs focused on supporting female and nonbinary teens in the Boston Area: Urban Explorers, a highly-accessible summer program that connects teens to opportunities for growth and support in their local community; Real Circles which emerged during COVID in response to the need to find alternate models for building and sustaining deep and authentic support networks for teens. Her community-focused work has also included connecting Hurricane Katrina Evacuees with local supports and working to lift up Cambridge families via a home visiting program sponsored by Cambridge Public Schools.

elin.weeman@seguinlandinstitute.org

Jenny’s (she/her) 14 years as an outdoor guide have brought her all over the globe leading backpacking, sea kayaking, cultural exchange, winter adventure, and river expeditions from the Peruvian Andes to the wild waters of Maine, her chosen home. Her award-winning writing has appeared in magazines across the country. She's currently working on her debut book project, Finding Petronella, which traces her 2014 solo trek across Finland following the footsteps of a legendary woman beyond the Arctic Circle.

Jenny's good life is helping people find their voice through creative writing. When she's not writing, teaching, or adventuring, you can find her playing ultimate frisbee or disc golf, cold dipping in the winter ocean, or choreographing flashmobs. She never leaves home without a trusty pair of adventure pants and a waterproof ukulele.

Courses: Wintering: Writing in Fire & Ice, The Good Life For All

jenny.oconnell@seguinlandinstitute.org

Ida (she/her) is the director of mindfulness programming at Seguinland Institute. She’s also a treehouse-preneur, runner, ice-bather and forager who hails from Luleå in the north of Sweden where the reindeer roam. Ida takes joy in teaching mindfulness to emerging adults. Ida was introduced to yoga asana as an anxious teen who had been on-the-move from a young age. The practice followed her sporadically, as she studied and travelled from Sweden London to India to Berlin to Cuba…Eventually, somehow, she grew roots on the salty island of Georgetown, Maine - building treehouses and exploring this new land. Living across a vast ocean from friends and family, a regular practice of yoga and mindfulness has become a tool for grounding herself in this place and in her body.

Her intention as a teacher is to create a space that is welcoming to all (beginners and experts alike) and to facilitate movement and breath such that students experience the insights that come with greater awareness of their bodies and minds. Her wish is that this practice deepens not only their connection to the many layers of self but also to the environment around us. At Seguinland Institute she takes mindfulness as a starting point, facilitating yoga, breathwork and meditation. Ida looks forward to practicing with you.

ida.lennestal@seguinlandinstitute.org

Katie (she/her) is an artist, cook, and entrepreneur. She majored in textile design and ceramics and Rhode Island School of Design and is the founder of two creative businesses, Suzie Automatic and Docksmith. She is a passionate gardener and cook.

Katie.goodwin@seguinlandinstitute.org

'Kafari’ (he/him) is the alias of Cincinnati, OH born, Portland, ME based pianist, rhythm bones player, beatmaker, and teaching artist Ahmad Muhammad. His music synthesizes his love of ambient piano music, spiritual jazz and experimental hip-hop, with influences including Dorothy Ashby, J Dilla, Chopin, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who in a 2014 performance sparked his interest in the rhythm bones (an Irish instrument popularized in the US in blackface minstrelsy), which Kafari often teaches to audiences. He appears weekly at The Jewel Box in Portland, where he performs piano/bass renditions of songs requested by the prior week's audience.

In the liner notes to his recent release 'Riffs and Lullabies vol. II', Kafari says: "I think of being a musician as a private public journey. My intention is to care for myself and to cultivate a personal relationship with music that is expressive, healing, and that serves my needs at the time. Perhaps through that act of expression, I can make a connection with you. Thank you for listening.”

Description text goes hereMatthew Cumbie (he/him/his) is a collaborative dancemaker, writer, and artist educator. His artistic research cultivates processes and experiences that are participatory and intergenerational, moving through known and unknown, and bring a poetic lens to a specifically queer experience. His choreography and dancemaking- considered “a blend of risk-taking with reliability, [and] a combination of uncertainty and wisdom,”- weaves together a physical vocabulary of momentum and clarity, revelatory moments, and a belief in a body’s capacity to meet each moment.

He has danced in the companies of Christian von Howard, Keith Thompson, Jill Sigman, Paloma McGregor, and Dance Exchange- an intergenerational dance organization founded by Liz Lerman- where he became an Associate Artistic Director and the Director of Programs and Communications. With Dance Exchange, he collaborated on and performed in works ranging in topic from the human genome to prayer and protest, on the highest point of the Great Smoky Mountains during a total solar eclipse, and with community organizers and activists after years of research and work in response to structures of racism and erasure in Dallas, Texas. In partnership with Dance Exchange, Matthew advanced his body of work Growing Our Own Gardens- an iterative intergenerational performance project rooted in queer world-making that partners with local LGBTQ+ and arts organizations, like the Rainbow History Project, the DC Center, and Dance Place, to catalyze intergenerational LGBTQ+ convenings and reflection.

As an artist educator, Matthew helped develop and brand Cassie Meador’s Moving Field Guide: a program created in partnership with the US Forest Service that connects artists with scientists, naturalists, and environmental educators to help people learn about environmental issues. He has been an artist-educator with Jacob’s Pillow, including their Curriculum in Motion program, and continues integrating artistic approaches and facilitation strategies in classrooms and with teachers in PG County (Maryland) and Waterville, ME. He has been on faculty at Texas Woman’s University, Queensborough Community College, American University, and the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, and has been an invited speaker at the New York City Roundtable Arts in Education conference, the Advancing the Human Condition Symposium at Virginia Tech, and the LGBT Health and Art Making conference, in partnership with the Human Rights Commission and the GWU Health and Well-being graduate program. He was also selected to be a part of the inaugural APAP Artist Leadership Fellowship cohort.

Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College. He continues creating work independently and in collaboration with other artists, and as a company member with Christopher K. Morgan & Artists. He supports the development of artists’ work as a professional fundraiser, specializing in online fundraising campaigns and grant writing, and is a certified practitioner of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. His work has been commissioned and supported by places like Dance Place, the Kennedy Center, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, and Harvard University, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, HumanitiesDC, the Arcus Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Maine Arts Commission. Originally from Houston, Matthew holds undergraduate degrees from Texas Lutheran University and Texas State University and an MFA in dance from Texas Woman’s University.

Rich Lee is the recipient of Seguinland Institute’s Inaugural Mad Farmer’s Award. The award is given to one Maine farmer every year who exemplifies the values and contrariness of poet-farmer Wendell Berry's Mad Farmer - who like the fox makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction, and who refuses to have his mind punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer, and who puts his faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years and who plants sequoias.

Rich grew up in Queens, New York City, a stone's throw away from LaGuardia airport. He's always had a passion for the environment and conservation. He attended SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry before pursuing farming as a full time occupation, beginning in January 2011 as an apprentice at Buckwheat Blossom Farm, a diversified, horse-powered homestead in Wiscasset, ME. There he developed his skills as a homesteader, vegetable farmer, and teamster. He met his wife Kate there as well. They started Tender Soles Farm in Richmond in the winter of 2015. Tender Soles is MOFGA certified organic horse-powered vegetable and flower farm.

Together Chloe and Bill run Begin Again Farm where most the produce goes to local food banks through the Mainers Feeding Mainers program. They adhere to “hard-corganics,” a term coined by Bill and defined as “a way of farming rooted in the natural abundance of the soil, seeking to sequester carbon and feed the soil microflora, eschewing the use of chemicals, and looking to a diverse community for inspiration and love, offering a vulnerable heart in return.”

Bill has been a hard-corganic farmer for almost twenty years, providing the community with beautiful organic food and mentoring dozens of farmers to launch their own farms. Chloe grew up on her family’s farm in Nobleboro and started farming with Bill a few years ago. Chloe hails from rural Maine, is the Co-Director alongside Canyon Woodward of Dirtroad Organizing, which supports rural leaders and organizers across the country.  Chloe served in the Maine House of Representatives in 2018 and the Maine State Senate in 2020. She was youngest woman ever to serve in the Maine Senate. Chloe is also the Co-Founder/Advisor at JustME for JustUS–a Maine-based organization focused on rural youth civic engagement and climate justice–and the co-author of Dirt Road Revival.

Chloe and Bill share the farm with Bill’s children, CJ and Eli, as well as Chloe’s dog, Elsie, and our beloved cows and chickens.

Rachel Alexandrou (b. 1986) is an interdisciplinary artist, who uses her education in plant science and collaborative practice, to create experiential work about food, flora, and innovating human relationships to the natural landscape. As Artist in Residence and Guest Lecturer at Seguinland Institute, she teachers workshops on foraging and works with students to co-create food-based events, including foraged feasts. Rachel has a BS in Horticulture from University of Maine and has studied Science Illustration