Join husband and wife team Erik Kiviat and Elaine Colandrea in this one-of-a-kind celebration of kinship with nature and community. Explore the intersections of scientific inquiry into the natural world and spiritual grounding of our inner landscape thorugh readings, discussion, breathwork, and movement. Kiviat is the executive director of Hudsonia, Ltd. and co-author of Urban Biodiversity: The Natural History of the New Jersey Meadowlands. Colandrea is a movement artist and the co-author of The Elemental Body: A Movement Guide to Kinship with Ourselves and the Natural World. Open to anyone! Refreshments will be served.


About the Speakers

Elaine Colandrea’s interest in the transformative capacity of the body led to a master’s degree in Dance Education from Columbia University and careers in dance/choreography, somatic education and bodywork. Based in the Hudson Valley, Elaine teaches regularly in Italy and has been an invited presenter at many retreat centers and somatic conferences. Elaine is Artistic Director of Watermark Arts, which hosts digital art galleries; produces exhibitions, films and performances; publishes an annual journal and convenes somatic movement workshops. Artfully embodying the natural world in service to creating a more humane society is an abiding passion. Learn more about her work at www.elainecolandrea.com & www.watermarkarts.org.

Erik Kiviat is a co-founder (1981) and the executive director of Hudsonia, a nonprofit institute for research and education in the environmental sciences based at Bard College in Annandale, New York. Erik formerly taught natural history and environmental studies at Bard. He holds a B.S. in natural sciences from Bard, M.A. biology State University at New Paltz, and Ph.D. ecology from Union Institute. Erik has studied plants, animals, and their habitats in the Hudson Valley, northeastern New Jersey, and widely in North America and Europe, ranging from rural to urban-industrial and wildland landscapes. Erik’s research addresses wetland habitats and organisms especially in freshwater tidal environments, biota associated with nonnative weeds, turtles and other herpetofauna, and human ecology, and a prominent question in his studies is always, “How can people use the landscape with less adverse impacts on uncommon and rare wildlife and plants." Learn more about his work at www.hudsonia.org.