Journey
of the Universe

Melissa K. Nelson

Melissa K. Nelson is a cultural ecologist, writer, educator, researcher, media-maker, and activist. Her work is dedicated to indigenous revitalization, environmental protection and restoration, and the renewal and celebration of community health and cultural arts. In 2002 she joined the department of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. Since 1993 Melissa has served as the president and executive director of The Cultural Conservancy (TCC), which is dedicated to the revitalization of indigenous cultures and their ancestral lands. In 2005 Melissa co-produced the award-winning documentary film, The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together. Her book, Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, is an edited anthology of over twenty indigenous leaders. Melissa is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota and is of mixed-blood heritage: Chippewa (Anishinaabe) and French-Cree (Métis) from her mother and Norwegian from her father. She was born and raised in northern California.

Other Bios

Tom Collins

Tom Collins has taught secondary school students in independent schools for over 20 years. His academic training, continuing education, and intellectual passions are in the fields of world history, religious studies, world literature, and environmental studies.

Marya Grathwohl

Marya Grathwohl, OSF is a Sister of Saint Francis who has advanced degrees in Religious Studies and Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness.

Sachiko Kawaura

Sachiko Kawaura has a Ph.D. in Integral Studies. She is on the humanities faculty at Nanzan University in the Department of Psychology and Human Relations.

Host & Co-Writer

Brian Thomas Swimme

Brian Thomas Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oregon in 1978 for work in gravitational dynamics. He brings the context of story to our understanding of the 13.7 billion year trajectory of cosmogenesis. Such a story, he feels, will assist in the emergence of a flourishing Earth community. brianswimme.org

Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Joel R. Primack

After helping to create what is now called the "Standard Model" of particle physics, Primack began working in cosmology in the late 1970s and he became a leader in the new field of particle astrophysics. He is one of the principal originators and developers of the theory of Cold Dark Matter, which has become the basis for the standard modern picture of structure formation in the universe.

Executive Producer & Co-Writer

Mary Evelyn Tucker

Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University where she has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Divinity School, the Department of Religious Studies, and the Center for Bioethics

Todd Duncan

Todd Duncan is a cosmologist whose work is guided by the theme of better understanding how a cosmic perspective gives our human experience a larger context of meaning. He combines a research background in physics with teaching science to a wide range of audiences. He is the author of An Ordinary World: The Role of Science in Your Search for Personal Meaning, and coauthor of Your Cosmic Context: An Introduction to Modern Cosmology.

Executive Producer

John Grim

John Grim is Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University with appointments at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale Divinity School, the Department of Religious Studies and the Center for Bioethics.

R. Craig Kochel

R. Craig Kochel is Professor of Geology at Bucknell University, where he helped found the Environmental Center. His areas of research include fluvial geomorphology, hydrology, geologic hazards, and planetary geology. His books include Process Geomorphology with (Jerry Miller and Dale Ritter), Sapping Features of the Colorado Plateau: a Comparative Planetary Geology NASA Field Guide (with Alan D. Howard), and Flood Geomorphology (with Victor Baker and Peter Patton).

Thomas Berry

Berry believed that humanity, after generations spent in self-glorification and despoiling the world, is poised to embrace a new role as a vital part of a larger, interdependent “communion of subjects” on earth and in the universe. He said the transformation of humanity’s priorities will not come easily. It requires what he called “the great work” — the title of his last major book — in four institutional realms: the political and legal order; the economic and industrial world; education; and religionFor further information: www.thomasberry.org

Ursula W. Goodenough

Ursula W. Goodenough is a Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the bestselling book Sacred Depths of Nature. This highly regarded book has resulted in her teaching the paradigm of Religious Naturalism and the Epic of Evolution around the world and also her participation in television productions on PBS and The History Channel, as well as NPR radio broadcasting. Dr. Goodenough earned her M.A. in zoology from Columbia Universityand completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Co-Producer & Director

David Kennard

David has more than 30 years of international experience as an award-winning producer, writer, director and communications consultant. incafilms.com

Terrence W. Deacon

Terrence W. Deacon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines developmental evolutionary biology and comparative neuroanatomy to investigate the evolution of human cognition, and is particularly focused on the explanation of emergent processes in biology and cognition. Deacon received a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard university in 1984.

Co-Producer, Director & Editor

Patsy Northcutt

Patsy’s love of filmmaking is coupled with her passion, creativity and commitment to producing stories that highlight a positive and sustainable future.

Scott Sampson

Scott Sampson is a Canadian dinosaur paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science communicator who presently serves as Research Curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah. His research focuses on the ecology and evolution of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs, and he has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Madagascar, Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Catherine Lynn Butler

A seasoned storyteller, Catherine has written and produced award-winning science, culture and social POV shows for clients including PBS, The Discovery Channel, The National Science Foundation, The Learning Channel, independent filmmakers, as well as national and international non-profits

Melissa K. Nelson

Melissa K. Nelson is a cultural ecologist, writer, educator, researcher, media-maker, and activist. Her work is dedicated to indigenous revitalization, environmental protection and restoration, and the renewal and celebration of community health and cultural arts. In 2002 she joined the department of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. Since 1993 Melissa has served as the president and executive director of The Cultural Conservancy (TCC), which is dedicated to the revitalization of indigenous cultures and their ancestral lands.

Cinematographer

Ian Salvage

Ian Salvage Director of Photography, UK-Based Cameraman for Documentaries, Dramas, Commercials and Idents. iansalvage.co.uk

Cynthia Stokes Brown

Cynthia Stokes Brown is Professor Emerita, Dominican University of California. She devoted twenty years to directing and/or teaching in the single subject credential program. She is the author of Refusing Racism: White Allies in the Struggle for Civil Rights (Teachers College Press) and Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New Press, 2007).

Carl Anthony

Carl Anthony is the founder of Breakthrough Communities, a Bay Area non-profit organization committed to building multi-racial, multi-cultural leadership for sustainable metropolitan communities in California, in the United States, and in the world. He is former executive director of the Urban Habitat Program, one of the oldest environmental justice organizations in the country.

Richard Register

Richard Register is a theorist and author working in ecological city design and planning who has initiated physical projects and municipal policies in the San Francisco area. These have included creek restoration, urban agriculture and built ecological architectural projects. He was founding president of the non-profit educational and research corporations Urban Ecology (1975) and Ecocity Builders (1992).

Richard B. Norgaard

Richard B. Norgaard is Professor of Energy and Resources Groupand of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is among the founders of the field of ecological economics and served as President of the International Society for Ecological Economics (1998-2001). Norgaard is the author of Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Co-Evolutionary Revisioning of the Future and co-author or editor of three additional books.

Penny Livingston-Stark

Penny Livingston-Stark is internationally recognized as a permaculture teacher, designer and speaker. Penny has been teaching and working professionally in the land management, regenerative design, and permaculture development field for 25 years and has extensive experience in all phases of ecologically sound design and construction as well as the use of natural non-toxic building materials.

David Begay

David Begay is a member of the Navajo Nation. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in Political Science with a concentration in Policy Analysis and Indian Policy and Law Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, with a concentration in Indigenous Education and Application of Traditional Knowledge.

Nancy C. Maryboy

Nancy C. Maryboy is the President and Founder of the Indigenous Education Institute whose mission is preserving, protecting, and applying indigenous knowledge.

Paula Gonzalez

Paula González, SC entered the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati in 1954. She earned her Ph.D. in biology at the Catholic University in Washington, DC, and was a biology professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, for 21 years. Sister Paula has worked for more than three decades to promote sustainable living.

Belvie Rooks

Belvie Rooks' work weaves the worlds of spirituality, feminism, cosmology and social justice with a passion for dialogue. As an educator, she is the creator of a ground-breaking, project-based educational curriculum--based on Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's, The Universe Story--entitled, Hey Listen Up: A Sense of Self-A Sense of Place.

Drew Dellinger

Drew Dellinger is a poet, teacher, writer and speaker who has inspired minds and hearts around the world, performing poetry and keynoting on justice, ecology, cosmology and compassion.

Nancy Ellen Abrams

Nancy Ellen Abrams has a B.A. from the University of Chicago in the history and philosophy of science and a law degree from the University of Michigan. She is the co-author, with Joel R. Primack, of The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (2006) and The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World (2011).

Bindu Mohanty

Bindu Mohanty, a writer and teacher, has lived in Auroville, an international community in southern India since 1994. Recognized by the United Nations as an experiment in human unity, Auroville founded in 1968, is based on the evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo. Committed to the practice of Integral Yoga, she believes that social change requires a radical transformation of the individual.

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