PLAYA Alumni

Emily Cohen is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in ecological design and community planning.  She is intrigued at the balance between art and science, built and natural, chaos and order. Her focus at Playa involves creating a field guide to climate change...

Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer. His work explores the aesthetics, ethics and poetics of interconnectedness. He is particularly interested in space, spirituality, pedagogy and progressive praxis. His projects have been presented at Beton7 in Athens,...

I began making photographs of the landscape in Cape Cod at the age of 16. Growing up on a sparse, thin spit of sand surrounded by ocean anchored my spirit to the land. Driving west to school in San Francisco I was awed by the vastness of the American West. My feelings...

With a exciting background in ecology and fine art artist Shane Koehler has traveled the world teaching environmental education, designing and making environmental landscapes and creating wildlife conservation themed watercolor paintings. He has worked for notable...

Historian Tracy J. Prince, Ph.D. is a Research Professor at Portland State University's American Indian Teacher Program, a Fulbright Specialist (Malta), and the author of 4 books (Notable Women of Portland, Portland’s Slabtown, Portland’s Goose Hollow, and Culture...

Allen Braden is the author of a poetry collection A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and a chapbook of poems Elegy in the Passive Voice. Former poet-in-residence for the Poetry Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he lives in Lakewood, Washington.

Owen Gump is a Bay Area-based visual artist working with photography and related media. His work examines the relationship between built environments and nature, focusing on the landscapes of the Western U.S. and their representation of cultural ideologies, past and...

I have written poems for a long time. Since 1987 have taught school children poetry writing and publishing, at various times, in seven states. I make books, broadly defined; have worked with music, poems, and dancers. I build things with wood—cabinets, tables, a cedar...

Corwin Levi is a mixed media, project-based artist whose practice centers around transforming ideas into experiences. He has shown and curated across the country and been awarded fellowships and artist residencies both here and internationally. Residencies include the...

Ethan Cornell is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He received his education at the High School of Art and Design, NYC and the Parsons School of Design. Since graduation he has studied also at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice and...

Lehuauakea Fernandez is a mixed Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist from Hilo, Hawaiʻi. She has participated in several group shows in Portland, Oregon, most recently the 23rd Annual Recent Graduates Exhibition at Blackfish Gallery. Through a range of craft-based...

Adam is a landscape architect, artist, urban planner and designer. His most recent activity is founding Out of Office Architecture - a practice engaged in architectural prototyping, citizen dialogue and circular economy. Adam is also one of the driving forces behind...

I’ve had my heart broken through loss, I’ve never met my father, I knew hunger when I was young, stole both food and money, I’m learning the guitar, I’ve been wiggle-your-toes-in-love with someone, I was known for my moonwalking skills in my youth, I stopped to look...

Josh Lefkowitz received an Avery Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan. His poems and essays have been widely published online and in print, including The New York Times, Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, The Millions, The Rumpus, as well...

Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Receipt and Punish Honey. Her work has appeared in ecopoetics, New American Writing, Fence, Volt, and The Best American Poetry 2012. She teaches at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Jessica Zeglin is a sound and visual artist interested in understanding humans, biotic and abiotic entities, and ecosystems as emergent systems of consciousness and vocality. Her work uses sound, drawing, and installation to invite relationships, engaging skills of...

Nika Blasser is an interdisciplinary artist who works in a wide range of media including video, installation, drawing, painting, and photography. Nika’s practice explores the intersections between highly manipulated forms and organic genesis, often mixing synthetic...

Kate McIntyre's work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She teaches at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is the editor of The Worcester Review, a community literary magazine with an all-volunteer staff. Joe...

Teaching chemistry courses at the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Magali Roy-Fequiere’s work has appeared in African American Review, Cave Canem Anthology XIII, and The Squaw Valley Review. Having graduated from her three-year Cave Canem fellowship in 2013, she continued to apprentice at VONA, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley,...

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her most recent novel, Heat and Light, explores the fate of a Rust Belt town transformed when the natural gas industry comes to town. It won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was...

Nathan Ely is a photographer whose practice is an intersection of scientific and historic/alternative photographic image making. His work explores photography’s unique relation to light, space and time - possessing an “objective intelligence”, the camera has a...