MOTH Fellowship

Illustrative image — Art by Elena Landinez

As part of its MOTH Academy, the NYU MOTH Program offers the Fellowship Program as both a professional development opportunity for promising practitioners and scholars and as a space for creative incubation of actionable initiatives for improved relations with the more-than-human world. As such, the Fellowship serves both as a platform for emerging leaders in this growing field and as a strategic intervention in advancing the rights and well-being of the more-than-human world.

Each year, MOTH selects up to twelve outstanding thinkers and doers to join a vibrant, interdisciplinary cohort. Over the course of twelve months, fellows cultivate generative connections across disciplines, develop innovative projects, and deepen the skills and practices that enhance their ability to contribute meaningfully to this burgeoning field. Rooted in collaboration, the program brings fellows together to exchange their work, brainstorm ideas, and chart new paths forward as a community.

At the core of the program is a project conceived by each fellow and refined and expanded through collaboration with peers, mentors, and the wider MOTH community. Projects for this year’s Fellowship engage with the central theme of reciprocity with the rest of the more-than-human world: How can we live and work in more relational and reciprocal ways with the more-than-human world? How might we give back to the rest of nature for all it has given us?

The Fellowship is designed to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and exploration, and the 2026-2027 cohort represents these values in action. Proposed projects reflect the diversity of fellows’ backgrounds, the organizations and networks in which they are embedded, and the questions they are looking to address. By the end of the Fellowship, each fellow will have developed an actionable, impactful output which will be showcased at the 2027 MOTH Festival of Ideas.

Since the Fellowship is rooted in the principle of collaboration and collective impact, fellows are already embedded in broader communities, networks, and organizations of humans and nonhumans, enabling their projects to generate tangible benefits for broader collectives and ecosystems.

Beyond the individual project, the Fellowship experience is enriched through layered programmatic elements designed to nurture skills, deepen capacities, and foster community with humans and the rest of nature. Each fellow has been paired with a dedicated mentor from the MOTH Program who provides guidance throughout the year. The Fellowship follows a hybrid model, blending virtual workshops and meetings with immersive in-person, in-nature gatherings that offer opportunities for reflection, feedback, and cross-pollination of ideas and places.

Community is at the heart of MOTH and thus the Fellowship. Fellows not only form lasting, meaningful bonds with one another, but also become part of the wider MOTH network—a growing global community committed to reimagining our relationships with the more-than-human world. Fellows learn from each other—collaborating to refine their projects—and from the larger more-than-human world.

Program Design

Taimur Ahmad

Project: More-Than-Human Beings as Social Actors

Taimur Ahmad is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, currently conducting dissertation research in NYC. His work focuses on how people connect to the beyond human world, and also (and perhaps more importantly) how beyond human beings become social actors and shape our society.

Taimur is a born and raised New Yorker, but has also spent many years in the rural west following his passion for mountains and rock climbing, a practice that still shapes much of his time. Taimur worked in environmental advocacy before returning to scholarship, including two years lobbying in DC. Nature has always been the center of his life.

Carolina Angel Botero

Project: Plasticus: On the Limits of Reciprocity

Carolina Angel Botero holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia). Her work explores how science, law, and environmental governance shape the ways we understand and relate to the more-than-human world. From 2023 to August 2025, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the rights of nature movement in Chile through a legal case involving the Andean Cat.

Her current work builds on these questions by combining field research, art, and legal thinking to explore how humans, non-humans, and materials like plastic interact in shared environments. She is particularly interested in how these relationships challenge ideas of responsibility, coexistence, and ecological change

Alejo di Risio

Project: From Rights to Reciprocity: A Framework for Living (with) Rivers

Alejo di Risio is an Argentine strategist, communicator, researcher, and filmmaker working at the intersection of political ecology, environmental justice, culture, and public narrative. His work focuses on rivers, water governance, ecological futures, and the stories societies tell about life, territory, and the more-than-human world. He directs communication and advocacy processes for environmental and social justice organizations in Latin America, and he is the director of the documentary Por el Paraná: La Disputa por el Río.

Across his work, Alejo combines research, storytelling, strategy, and civic imagination to help build more just and relational ways of living with ecosystems. He is also developing frameworks and public methodologies for desirable ecological futures, including participatory processes that connect culture, governance, and collective action.

Kees Foekema

Project: Reciprocity and Citizenship and the More-Than-Human

Kees Foekema is a moderator, programme maker, and writer working at the intersection of ecology, politics, and the arts. For five years, he was a programme editor at De Balie in Amsterdam, where he curated and moderated over 150 public programmes on land use, biodiversity, agriculture, and climate. He has worked with cultural institutions, festivals, and universities including Into The Great Wide Open, Brainwash Festival, Wageningen University, and the University of Amsterdam.

Trained in political theory, Kees is interested in how ideas of citizenship might shift in response to the ecological crisis. Alongside his programme work, he is writing a collection of essays based on fieldwork in Europe, Central Asia, and Brazil, exploring how humans become-with landscapes. His practice connects literary work with public assemblies that experiment with new forms of ecological citizenship grounded in attention, reciprocity, and kinship.

Elodie Freymann

Project: Zoopharmacognosy and Reciprocity to the More-Than-Human World

Elodie Freymann is a naturalist, artist, and science communicator, working within the field of Zoopharmacognosy—the study of how animals use medicine in the wild. Her mission is to help protect our planet’s forest pharmacies from disappearing and to find new, creative pathways to safeguard both human and animal access to their wild medicine cabinets. Now based at Brown University as a Voss post-doctoral fellow, Elodie’s current project expands this research into a new ecosystem in the Central Peruvian Amazon, examining how both animals and humans interact with, and share, medicinal plants.

Manuel (Eddie) Gonzalez

Project: More-Than-Human Chaplaincy

Eddie Gonzalez works at the intersections of spiritual care, community engagement, digital media, and creative expression—primarily through writing and audio. He has a background in journalism and creative writing and became a hospice chaplain in 2009. Over the last sixteen years, Eddie has worked across healthcare and national nonprofits—including CoGenerate, On Being, and StoryCorps—to create spaces for storytelling, reflective dialogue, and compassionate listening. He currently serves on the board of the podcast, Threshold.

Eddie has a deep interest in the relationship between inner and outer life, and in how the stories we tell can have profound impacts on ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

Gulnaz Khan

Project: More-Than-Humans Protocols for the Newsroom

Gulnaz Khan is the climate editor at TED and a former editor at National Geographic. She is the creator and executive producer of Sacred Planet with Gulnaz Khan on PBS, a documentary series exploring how climate change is reshaping sacred spaces and traditions around the world. The series builds on her research as a 2022–23 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she studied how faith-based communities are responding to unprecedented ecological breakdown. She holds a Master of Science from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Certificate in Climate Change and Health from Yale University.

Elahe Rajabiani

Project: Nature Consultation

Elahe Rajabiani is a designer and researcher at the EU Policy Lab of the European Commission, working at the intersection of art, science, and policy. Her practice spans participatory futuring and speculative design, developing methods and tools that help institutions engage with nature-centric governance. Trained in product-service system design at Politecnico di Milano, she has led transdisciplinary programmes with universities, industries, and CERN IdeaSquare. Alongside her institutional work, she is an independent filmmaker, butoh dancer, and explorer of animism and spirituality.

Elahe joined the MOTH Fellowship to bring the more-than-human world into policymaking, and policymaking closer to the more-than-human world.

Tuck Yates Tyrrell

Project: Stories of the Earth

Sarah Ann Woodbury

Project: Epiphytics

sarah ann woodbury (sjörå) is a wildling poet fledged by a flock of gentle beings: two musicians, Wasatch, Wind Rivers, and Great Salt Lake. She comes from five generations of Mormon stock and is a daughter of the land. sarah writes, creates ritual performance works, sings, and studies eco-sociology with sentient multispecies worlds within whom she is embedded. Currently a wilderness writer-in-residence, she spends her days dancing inside mountain rainbreath.

sarah’s artist collective Apprentice collaborates with more-than-human beings to create acts of multispecies “wonder disruption.” Her recent work is kept by beloved ecologies, as well as in The American Journal of Poetry, CALYX Press, People and Nature, and Sugar House Review. sarah’s other work is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Multispecies Justice, A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains, and elsewhere. She is a founding board member for Bichu-Nanewe (Return of the People) and Los Cedros Fund.

MOTH Fellowship 2027 Cohort

Components of the Fellowship

The Project

Fellows develop and begin to implement projects which promote, in some fashion, reciprocity or a relational approach with the rest of nature through creative or strategic action. Projects are designed to address a particular question or problem regarding reciprocity with the more-than-human world.

The precise contours of this project and proposed action vary depending on the disciplinary background of the fellow. Fellows are assisted in the design and refinement of their projects by the MOTH team as well as the other fellows.

Community of Practice

In addition to supporting personal and professional development, the Fellowship plugs practitioners embedded in various networks and ecosystems into a rich community of practice which can nurture their growth as well as strengthen the field. The program accomplishes this first by building a complementary cohort of fellows and second by connecting fellows to the larger MOTH team, including mentors from the MOTH Collective. Ultimately, fellows are integrated into the extended MOTH network.

Transformative, Ecocentric Learning

Through the program, fellows dive deeper into ecocentric ideas and practices, absorbing insights from a range of disciplines, including law, the biological sciences, storytelling, and the arts. The in-person, in-nature gatherings and online workshops and meetings include opportunities to learn from experts at the forefront of new and transformative approaches to acting with and on behalf of the more-than-human world. Through these learning opportunities, MOTH is especially interested in introducing fellows to how place-based learning and tapping into emotions like awe and wonder can meaningfully facilitate and enhance actions, strategies, and tools to better relate to and act with the more-than-human world.

MOTH FELLOWSHIP