FREE | Every Friday: May 9 - September 19 | 5 PM - 6 PM
Join us throughout the residency season for our free public series of short and informal artist talks, readings, and presentations. We’ll learn about works-in-progress from our artists and scholars-in-residence with informative and inspiring presentations in all disciplines. This is a wonderful way to kick off your weekend! Bring a friend, all are welcome.
Location: Main Campus. Look for Craigardan Event sign at the end of Main Campus driveway (two “doors” west of the farm store, towards Keene). Google Maps Link
Jenny Breen
Jenny Breen is Craigardan’s 2025 Teaching Fellow. Jenny has been working at the intersection of human, community, and environmental health in the Twin Cities and throughout the country for over 30 years. She co-creates training and learning experiences for individuals, communities, organizations, and colleagues to explore and expand food, health, and sustainability skills, and builds programming and community engagement based in human and planetary health, wellbeing, equity, justice, and joy.
Jenny’s content and classes utilize cooking and basic nutrition to address human and community health, including challenging the environmental and structural barriers within our systems. Culinary ‘medicine’ and regenerative food systems are foundational to her teaching, Jenny hopes for this collective work to impact the upstream effects of injustice within the food system and throughout our communities. All of Jenny's work in the kitchen happens within a culture of joy, connection, and satisfaction, which she believes to be fundamental to human and planetary wellbeing.
Jenny’s vision is to move toward equity and growth that translates to a healthier food system, a healthier community, and a healthier planet.
Alec Tiger
Alec Tiger (Muscogee Creek Nation) is a writer working primarily in fiction. Alec is an upcoming graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program and has a background in philosophy and economics at the University of Colorado. Alec’s fiction blends historical and contemporary narratives of Muscogee people, as well as engagement and vitalization of traditional stories. Alec was awarded the Harpo Foundation Native American Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center 2024, and was a finalist in Narrative Magazines 2024 Fall Story contest.
Outside of writing, Alec works in economic and community development with urban Indigenous populations in the Pacific Northwest and Tribal Nations across the United States. He currently lives in New York.
Shawndel N. Fraser
Shawndel N. Fraser is an Environmental Psychologist, Public Intellectual, and Artist whose work and words catalyze transformation through interdisciplinary engagement. She creates a new nature–culture imagination by developing pragmatic solutions rooted in the social and natural sciences, esoteric wisdom, artistic practice, and healing modalities to create safe(r)environments.
As a generalist / multi-disciplinary artist, Shawndel may employ ceramics, fiber art, digital media, writing, bookbinding, metals, jewelry, papermaking, and traditional crafts as needed. As a social scientist and open “Ajna” thinker, she weaves connections between philosophy, current events, (socio)cultural norms, aesthetics, pride, and practices. Her goal is ultimately to uncover opportunities for “inner-personal alchemy” to drive cultural transformation and consilience rooted in ecofeminist deep-ecology.