About Maureen

Maureen is a lifelong creative practitioner. She is an active member of Equinox Studios/Watershed Community Development in Seattle; a graduate of the Trowbridge Atelier in Modern Color at Gage Academy; and a founding advisor with Original Mind Residency. She made sculpture installations at Burning Man, and for five years was an advisory board member with Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF) where she co-wrote BRAF’s first successful proposal funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. Maureen has a dedicated studio practice in painting, printmaking, and mixed media drawing. She also writes prose poetry and short stories and is learning classical guitar.

Maureen is currently working on a multidisciplinary documentary film project in Mauritania, funded through a University of Washington EarthLab Innovation Grant for Climate & Social Justice, and on a collaborative art-science project with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, funded through the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center. Previously she designed and taught interdisciplinary seminars at the University of California Davis; and courses in ecology, evolution, climate, environmental history, and art+science at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. She also co-led multiple science-policy initiatives involving science, Indigenous knowledge, energy, and the environment in the US and Canada (Oil Sands Moratorium, Science Integrity Project). For two decades, Maureen also designed and facilitated multidisciplinary leadership development workshops for researchers, conservationists, and environmental justice practitioners, in the US and internationally, in parallel with research (eg, Conservation Leadership Programme, Smith Fellows) following an early career as a field educator with the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Maureen's current projects each connect sciences, arts, and humanities. She co-founded and serves on the leadership team of TealWaters, a freshwater wetlands visual mapping platform funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator. TealWaters aims to empower natural resource managers and communities to govern and restore wetlands across the United States and around the world. She also is part of a documentary film project titled Life In Spite of It All: Water, Wetlands, and Reclamation in a Changing Climate, funded through a University of Washington EarthLab Innovation Grant for Climate & Social Justice. The film centers the voices and experiences of the Haalpulaar’en community of Khareirat in Mauritania, its relationship with Tambass -- a wetlands area under pressure from climate change and human actions -- and how the community is living with major hydrologic changes while discovering possibilities of action and repair. Maureen is also part of an art-science project with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, as a team member of the project Exploring the Past to Plan for the Future: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Paleoperspectives to Inform Climate Change Adaptation, funded through the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center. 

Maureen is a third/fifth generation Irish-American descended from the West of Ireland. She lives on the unceded Duwamish and Coast Salish lands of Seattle, Washington. Maureen has a 10+ year meditation and nature-based practice. She trained with Animas Valley Institute and is a Certified Mindfulness Instructor with MNDFL. Born with a rare heart defect, and its attending near-deaths and surgical restorations, Maureen has deep respect for the strange, beautiful, mysterious under-terrains of earth, embodiment, and imagination; their interweavings with science, art, and nature; and their ancestral rhythms and threads.

Maureen is committed to principles of ethical space and practices of ethical, inclusive facilitation and co-creation with and within diverse groups and collectives. She seeks to embody these commitments through living practice, service, ongoing training, and reparations. She works with a diverse group of partner-practitioners with shared ethics and commitments. Maureen’s CMI certification with MNDFL is grounded in ethical practice and embodied social justice. For seven years she co-chaired the Welcoming and Accessibility committee as a former board member of North Cascades Institute.

In Irish, cré dhorcha (pr: cray gor a hah) means “dark earth” and “dark creature.” In the Irish language, many words hold multiple meanings, expressing a deep natural poetry of inter-relationship. “Dark creature” represents a network of meanings. Cré: earth, soil, wild creatures. Dhorcha: dark, deep. In combination, the many-formed, often cryptic, ever-evolving expressions of life and nature’s imagination and the sometimes hidden earth from which they emerge. The translation of cré dhorcha to “dark creature” welcomes the natural multiplicity of human being, including the vital layers that live beneath the visible surface, and our ancient partnerships with the “endless forms most beautiful” of the more-than-human world. Dark Creature welcomes and celebrates the whole.