Zoë Gamell Brown (she/they)
Chinook Illahee, Oregon
Howdy, how are you? My name’s Zoë, and I’m a queer first-generation Boviander Guyanese American award-winning artist, educator, and storyteller. My work explores Boviander ecologies through ceramic sculptures, culinary catharsis, creative nonfiction, experimental video, and photopoetry projections.
In 2020, I founded Fernland Studios to hold space for creative ecological justice—the use of art to heal our spirits, environments, and communities— through artist residencies, ecological funding, and writing retreats for and with communities of color in the Pacific Northwest.
I’m a doctoral student in the University of Oregon Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies' inaugural cohort and a New Media Culture Certificate recipient. As a nontraditional student, I received my bachelor's degree in Public Relations, minoring in Geography, from Texas State University, and graduated with my Environmental Studies master's degree at the UO.
I am a 2023 Writers in the Schools Apprentice with Literary Arts, a Lila Jewel Award awardee through Seeding Justice, and a Charles A Reed Graduate Fellow through the UO College of Arts and Sciences. I received a Digital Evolution/Artist Retention Fellowship through the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and a Louise Westling Distinguished Environmental Justice Fellowship through the UO Pacific Northwest Racial and Climate Justice Futures Institute in 2022. I was an inaugural Women Innovation Network cohort member, a National Education for Women’s Leadership of Oregon member through PSU, and a Spiritual Ecology Fellow through Emergence Magazine in 2021.
I grew up on Munsee Lenape land in Roselle Park, New Jersey, before moving to Akokisa land outside Houston, Texas, at seven. When I’m not daydreaming, you can find me rambling around the Pacific Northwest, taking pictures of trees and sea anemones.
Let’s get to know each other: zoegamell.com