2026 Events

Jared Aldern is a grant writer, historian, fire practitioner, and a cofounder of the Sierra-Sequoia Burn Cooperative; he has over thirty years of experience partnering and collaborating with Tribal Nations in California.

Theresa Lynn Gregor, a Kumeyaay and Yoéme scholar, researches California American Indian women, Tribal sovereignty, cultural revitalization, and environmental resilience. She leads Mataguay Consulting Services LLC to support Indigenous sovereignty, nonprofit leadership, community service, and survivance.

Natasha Caverley is a multiracial Canadian woman of Algonquin, Jamaican and Irish heritage. She holds a M.Ed in Counselling Psychology and an Interdisciplinary PhD in Organizational Studies from the University of Victoria. Natasha has held research and policy analyst and organizational development positions within Indigenous, non-Indigenous and public service organizations specializing in community facilitation, project management and organizational behaviour. In the Landkeeping Anthology, she is a co-author for the “Fire Culture as ‘Good Medicine’: The Revitalization of First Nations Cultural Burning Practices in British Columbia, Canada” and “We Are Fire: Revitalizing Indigenous-led Fire Practices in the kisiskāciwani-sīpiy maskēko askīy” book chapters.

Kelsey Leonard is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability and an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. She is an enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation and a leading scholar in Indigenous water governance, climate justice, and Earth law. Her work brings together Indigenous science and law to support water protection, ocean kinship, and community resilience.

Chiara Barzini is an Italian author and screenwriter, nominated among the 100 most influential Women of 2020 by Forbes Italy. She is the author of the story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press), the novel Things That Happened Before The Earthquake (Doubleday), and an upcoming non-fiction book about the Los Angeles aqueduct and the reckless dreams called Aqua (Canongate), published in Italy in April 2025 with the title L’Ultima Acqua (Einaudi).

David Ulin is Professor of the Practice of English, and editor of the journal Air/Light. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method;Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and The New York Times; his essay “Bed” was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA-IMAP Master Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles. He has also edited The Didion Collection, including Didion: The 1960s and 70s, Didion: The 1980s and 90s, and Didion: Memoirs and Later Writings, for Library of America.

Christopher Hawthorne is an architecture critic, educator, and filmmaker.  He currently serves as a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture. He served from 2018 to 2022 as the first Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles. From 2004 to 2018 Hawthorne was the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. His writing on architecture and the arts has also appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harvard Design Magazine, Architect, Architectural Record, Domus, and many other publications. With Alanna Stang, he is author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press).

Jose Machuca is a Technical Director and the Mass Timber Design Lead with the international engineering firm Holmes. As a practicing structural engineer on the West Coast for over 14 years, he has extensive experience in the design, analysis, and detailing of buildings in highly seismic regions. Inspired by architectural designs that celebrate load paths, Mass Timber design has become a focal point in his career. By leveraging his broad project and material type expertise, Jose has successfully executed both hybrid and full mass timber solutions for commercial, residential, industrial, and existing buildings. Some of his recent Mass Timber projects in California include 42XX in Marina del Rey and The Kind Project in Sacramento.

Nina Mahjoub leads the Holmes Southern California office. She brings extensive experience with a variety of construction types, and she realizes creative environments through insightful structural designs. Her expertise in high-performance structural design is invaluable for both new construction and historic renovations. As a LEED Accredited Professional, she is committed to progressive and environmentally-responsible building design. She recently served as Chair of SEAOSC’s Sustainable Design Committee and is a member of the US Green Building Council. Looking to the future of sustainable construction in California, Nina is excited about mass timber’s potential as an emerging building material. One of her most recent Mass Timber projects in California is 42XX in Marina del Rey—a visionary office campus that reimagines the office grid with a hybrid of mass timber, steel, and concrete.  

James Michael Buckley is an urban planner and historian in San Francisco, CA. He holds a Master’s degree in urban planning and a PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley and has taught at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the University of Oregon. His book, City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas, 2024), has been awarded the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award (Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2025), the J.B. Jackson Award (American Association of Geographers, 2025), and the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize (UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes, 2025).

Brad Temkin is a photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Field Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Sivori Art Museum (Buenos Aires), the Southeastern Museum of Photography, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions such as The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Amon Carter Museum, the George Eastman Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Temkin’s work has been featured in Aperture, TIME, Black & White Magazine, and European Photography. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and has received two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships (2007 and 2024). He is the author of three monographs: Private Places, Rooftop, and The State of Water. Temkin has taught photography at Columbia College Chicago since 1984 and continues to mentor emerging artists.

Carolin Görgen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Sorbonne Université. A historian of photography and the American West, she researches the histories of photo networks in the western United States and their environmental afterlives. Görgen’s research has been supported among others by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Huntington Library, and the Thomas Mann House. She was a 2025 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Martha A. Sandweiss is professor emerita of history at Princeton University, where she is founding director of the Princeton & Slavery Project. She is the award-winning author of many books, including Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West.

Laura Wilson is a photographer and author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, London’s Sunday Times Magazine and theWashington Post Magazine. Her books include: Watt Matthews of Lambshead (1989; second edition 2007; third edition 2023), Hutterites of Montana (2000), Avedon at Work: In the American West (2003), Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football (2003), That Day: Pictures in the American West(2015), From Rodin to Plensa: Modern Sculpture at the Meadows Museum (2018), The Writers: Portraits by Laura Wilson (2022) and Roaming Mexico (2025). She was awarded the Royal Photographic Society of England’s Book of the Year for Avedon at Work.

Amy Bowers Cordalis is a mother, fisherwoman, attorney, and member and former General Counsel of the Yurok Nation—the largest Indigenous Nation in California. She is currently the cofounder and executive director of the Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group, a nonprofit advancing Indigenous sovereignty through the protection of cultural and natural resources, including the undamming of the Klamath River. She is the recipient of the UN’s highest environmental honor, Champions of the World Laureate, and has been named to the second annual TIME100 Climate List (2024), featuring the one hundred most influential leaders driving business to real climate action. She is the author of The Water Remembers (Hachette, 2025).