The Eugene Environmental Film Festival believes in creating space to address critical issues facing our planet.
We support the work being done at local and global levels and share a deep connection and responsibility to protect the environment and work in solidarity with others in the struggle toward environmental justice.
Michele is interested in addressing the interrelated issues of environmental and economic exploitation, poverty, repression, and violence, which often force individuals and communities to leave their home countries. She has visually documented environmental rights abuses in Central and South America as well as coordinated speaking engagements and outreach for human rights delegations to help raise awareness about these issues. Her vision of creating the Eugene Environmental Film Festival is to bring people together across geographic boundaries to address critical environmental issues facing our planet and to acknowledge the people in the struggle for environmental justice.
Marsha is the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History and an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. Her scholarship focuses primarily on the environmental history of the American West. She is the author of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (University of Washington Press, 2009) which won four awards, including the Norris and Carol Hundley Award and the Hal Rothman Book Award, and Land of Plenty: Oklahomans in the Cotton Fields of Arizona, 1933-1942 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), which won the Angie Debo Prize. She has also written on wolf reintroduction, gendering environmental history, environmental justice, and architectural history. Her work has received two faculty research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a King Fellowship from the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and co-founder and co-coordinator of the Cascadia Environmental History Collaborative.
Originally, Lisa moved to Oregon to work for the Forest Service surveying threatened and endangered species like the Marbled Murrelet and Spotted Owl. She fell in love with the woods in Oregon and grew to understand what a precious resource it is; how important it is that we protect it. Now she understands that environmental politics are deeply about social justice issues. Communities of color & Indigenous communities are impacted at a much higher rate by environmental degradation and will be much more impacted by Climate change. As a citizen of planet Earth she feels a deep responsibility to not only protect the planet, but also to think about the people who are most impacted by what is happening. She is honored to work on the Eugene Environmental Film Festival and to bring our community together around these important issues.
Jesse naturally brings a humanistic approach to the CEF and JFI. Jesse’s work as Media GE for the CEF complements his work as a PPPM graduate student in Community and Regional Planning as well as a student in the Conflict and Dispute Resolution (CRES) Program (Environmental Conflict: Climate Change Specialization). Apart from managing technology for signature CEF events such as Interdisciplinarity 101, his interest in environment sustainability is informed by growing-up in Oregon and Hawai’i, and his own work in winemaking and photography. When not working he enjoys running, cycling, finding someone to play games with, and playing with his dog.