INSIDE THE GREENHOUSE | Re-telling climate change stories

People

Maxwell Boykoff

Max is a Professor in the Environmental Studies department (where he now serves as Chair) at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Max is a co-author and editor of seven books and edited volumes, along with over 200 articles, reports and book chapters. Among Max's other activities, he is a Contributing Author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment ‘Mitigation and Policy’ Report, he is Deputy Editor for the social sciences/history team for the Journal of Climatic Change and he has been an advisor on the Netflix 'Don't Look Up' film platform. Max also leads the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) while he leads Colorado Local Science Engagement Network and co-Directs Inside the Greenhouse. Max earned a PhD in Environmental Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a BS in Psychology from The Ohio State University.

Beth Osnes

Beth Osnes PhD, is a Professor of Theatre and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado. She is co-director of Inside the Greenhouse for creative climate communication and co-founder, with Dr. Chlesea Hackett, of SPEAK for female and non-binary youth vocal empowerment. Explore her most recent work, an art-science approach to youth engagement for interspecies friendship and survivability, available here that features award-winning films of large-scale bird puppets of numerous Colorado species. With Dr. Patrick Chandler, she co-developed Enacting Climate, an online open-source collection of climate-related tools and activities for student learning and climate action. Her books include Theatre for Women’s Participation in Sustainable Development and Performance for Resilience: Engaging Youth on Energy and Climate through Music, Movement, and Theatre. She is featured in the award-winning documentary Mother: Caring for 7 Billion. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Rebecca Safran

Becca Safran is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is co-director of Inside the Greenhouse for creative climate communication, where her focus  includes an exploration of humans and birds living side by side in the natural world: https://www.sidebyside.world/ and teaching a science communication class where students translate climate change science into creative films. As an evolutionary biologist, Becca’s interests are focused on the formation of new species with a special focus on one of the most widespread birds on planet earth: the barn swallow. Her research group works on a variety of projects related to the physiological, behavioral and ecological and climate factors that influence genomic divergence among closely related populations of barn swallows around the world from villages above the Tibetan Plateau in China to barns and bridges near the University of Colorado in Boulder. Funded by the National Science Foundation through several grants including CAREER award, Becca's research has appeared in Science, Current Biology, and Trends in Ecology and
Evolution and many other publications related to evolutionary ecology and genetics. Becca is passionate about social justice and belonging in STEM, a topic her research group has worked on collaboratively. You can read more about Becca and the Safran Lab here: http://www.safran-lab.com/. Becca lives in Boulder Colorado with her husband, Sam, their two boys, and two dogs.

Phaedra Pezzullo

Phaedra C. Pezzullo is an associate professor in the Department of Communication with affiliations in Media Studies and Environmental Studies. She researches environmental communication, environmental justice, and intersectional climate movements. Pezzullo authored Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution and Environmental Justice (University of Alabama Press, 2007), which won four awards. Pezzullo also has coauthored three editions of the textbook, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (Sage, 2016, 2018, 2021), coedited Green Communication and China (MSU Press, 2020), coedited Environmental Justice and Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007) and edited Cultural Studies and the Environment, Revisited (Routledge, 2010). Pezzullo lectures globally, including the Grand amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and Fudan University in Shanghai. She is coeditor of a University of California Press book series, Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture. She is Co-Director of C3BC (Creative Climate Communication & Behavior Change) and the Just Transition Collaborative. Committed to public engagement, she has partnered and consulted with the Pulitzer Center, the Sierra Club, government planning departments, and more. Pezzullo’s forthcoming book is Beyond Strawmen: Plastic Pollution, Impure Politics, and Networked Cultures of Care (University of California Press, 2023), based, in part, on her podcast, Communicating Care. For more information: https://phaedracpezzullo.com/ .

Presley Church (2020 - present)

Presley Church is a rising junior at Cornell University majoring in Fiber Science and Apparel Design in the College of Human Ecology, minoring in Climate Change. She grew up in Boulder and has engaged with sustainable fashion since she was 11 years old via Trash the Runway (a collaborator of Inside the Greenhouse). After completing her freshman year at the onset of the pandemic, Presley took a gap year and worked on a variety of climate communication projects. She interned for Inside the Greenhouse, Shhh, it's Real, Solve Climate by 2030 and served as the Communications Director of the AAAS Colorado Local Science Engagement Network. Presley is passionate about engaging all industries, particularly the fashion industry, with climate solutions. Additionally, she is interested in climate and science policy communications. She is excited to continue forging new paths between environmentalism, communication, and design.

Catherine Adams (present)

Catherine Adams is an incoming second year Environmental Policy and Decision Making major and Eminence Fellow at the Ohio State University. She is currently planning on minoring in creative writing and GIS. She is a climate justice organizer who has worked at both the local and national level. She co-founded Ohio Youth for Climate Justice in 2019 and worked on a national level as a member of the Communications team for U.S. Youth Climate Strike. Currently, she is Ohio Youth for Climate Justice’s Creative Director. Beyond her work as an activist, she is passionate about the ways in which art and writing can be used to build mass movements and increase public awareness of the climate crisis. 

Nancy Yoder (2021 - present)

Nancy Yoder is a Creative Technology Design and Computer Science student at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works primarily on front end web design and mobile app development. She is passionate about graphic design, as well as other forms of art such as jewelry making and crochet. She is currently the graphic and web design intern for Inside the Greenhouse, managing their social media accounts and websites as well as designing medias to display their curriculum. She is excited to continue her work with Inside the Greenhouse.

Molly McDermott (2020 - present)

Molly is currently a research scientist with Inside the Greenhouse, working to understand the impact of the Side by Side art-science program for high school youth. For her PhD research in Becca Safran’s lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, she tracked individual barn swallows – familiar farm residents across much of North America - to measure how nutrition and stress affect plumage traits and breeding performance. Previously, she studied how climate-driven vegetation change in the Arctic may impact insect communities and the songbirds that depend on them for food. In addition to her biological interests, she is a musician interested in communicating scientific information via creative disciplines.

Sean Race (2016)

ITG welcomed Sean Race to our internship team during the summer of 2016. As an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major at the University of Colorado, Sean was able to take a diversity of science classes; he enrolled in the Film and Climate Change class in fall 2015 to gain experiences in science communication and in particular, to try his hand at producing films. The ITG summer internship enabled Sean to deepen his skill sets in both science and science communication. In May 2016, he traveled with PhD student David Zonana to document ongoing work on how animals respond to climate change. This project is focused on how distributions of quail have shifted with changing climates in the high deserts of California. Sean produced two excellent short films during the summer: one that documents the research itself and another that highlights a local activist working on conservation issues in the California deserts.

Meridith Richter (2016)

Meridith Richter, a senior Technology, Arts, and Media major and Computer Science minor, was an Inside the Greenhouse intern for the summer of 2016. During that summer, she documented the mounting of an original Inside the Greenhouse performance, Shine, through CU’s Science Discovery camp. She also began the colossal job of editing a professional video recording of Shine that was directed by Arthur Fredrick the summer of 2016 in New York with local youth. This edited version of the performance will be one of the primary digital portions of a forthcoming book on Shine, entitled Performance for Resilience: Youth-sparked Community Engagement for Climate, Energy and Resilience Planning. Meridith is continuing her collaboration with Inside the Greenhouse and is fulfilling her capstone project for her degree by preparing the digital materials for this book (interviews, run of show…) for publication (resulting in a publishing credit for her). We are so impressed by her ability, attitude, and perseverance.

Barbara MacFerrin (2015)

Barbara has an undergraduate degree in Information Systems Security and worked in the information technology field in various environments ranging from the aerospace industry to healthcare and wellness. Barbara left her IT career to pursue a graduate degree in the Technology, Media and Society program at CU’s ATLAS institute. After completing the Inside the Greenhouse two-course series, Barbara was inspired to dedicate her efforts to communicating climate change and climate science.  She started an Internship for ITG in October 2015 for the City of Boulder’s Climate Commitment communication project.  Barbara is working with local high school students who are members of the Youth Opportunities Advisory Board (YOAB) to produce a short film about climate change impacts and opportunities for action in the Boulder community. 

Learn More About Climate (LMAC), ATLAS Institute: Technology, Media and Society program | website
Follow on twitter

Sara Berkowitz (2015)

Sara graduated from CU Spring 2015 with degrees in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Sociology. She also recieved a certificate in Public Health. After completing Becca Safran's class, she was inspired to dedicate more effort on the global climate change issue. She started her internship for Inside the Greenhouse after her graduation in 2015, along with former classmate Angela Earp. They traveled to New Mexico to cover the story of traditional herbalist Maclovia Sanchez de Zamora, and artist Nani Chacon. Sara currently is volunteering for Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, and hopes to pursue a career in nursing. She hopes to incoorporate enviornmentalism and social justice into her practices as a nurse. 

Angela Earp (2015)

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Angela Earp is a CU student majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. After winning first place in her class (Film and Climate Change)  film festival in December 2014 with her film Canaries of Climate Change, she began an internship for Inside the Greenhouse in the summer of 2015. Accompanied by another former classmate and Inside the Greenhouse intern, Sara Berkowitz, she traveled to Albaquerque, NM to film a mural being painted and the amazing women behind it. Angela and Sara ended their internship with three new short films, and an incredibly rewarding experience. Angela currently works in the Safran Lab at CU Boulder, and is pursuing careers involved in the creative communication of science. 

Connor Callahan (2014)

Conner first traveled with the performance Sol-Her Energ-He to the Navajo Nation in the Spring of 2015 while a part of the Creative Climate Communication course.  When the revised version of the show was being mounted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in June of 2015, Conner became an Inside the Greenhouse intern and created a video recording of the performance at NCAR and at the Conference on Communication and the Environment that occurred at CU Boulder.  What is unique about Conner's process in creating a recording of this event is that he was also very much a participant and performer in the piece, which granted him an embodied experience with the material.  He also influenced the development of the piece through the collaborative process.  Throughout he was a positive role model for the youth performers involved in the process.  He deepened our discussion of the environmental issues that are the focus of the show and contributed his ideas and energy throughout the entire process.  The recordings he created are terrific tools for sharing this work beyond the live experience.  His teaser of the performance can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3WFpK7wINE and his full-length edited recording of the performance can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsnbX8gLfq0