Making Waves was founded in 2023 by Sarah May, Nan Seymour, and Therese Berry to create participatory art as a form of joyful resistance. Making Waves has evolved to include multidisciplinary artists, poet-activists, puppeteers, multispecies justice advocates, youth organizers, ritualists, writers, and Lake-facing humans who are devoted to repairing our relationships with Great Salt Lake and the creatures who call the Lake their home.
Leadership
Nan Seymour (she/they)
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Nan is a lake-facing poet, Great Salt Lake celebrant, and vigil keeper.
She created the practice of River Writing in order to foster voice and authentic connection. This community-held writing practice is designed for anyone willing to pick up a pen. Everyone is invited. This PBS documentary highlights River Writing as a method of repair for what is broken in our relationship with the natural world.
In the summer of 2023, Nan was honored by Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall with a Mayor’s Artist Award. As poet-in-residence on Antelope Island, Nan led day-and-night vigils on behalf of the imperiled Great Salt Lake throughout the 2022 and 2023 Utah State legislative sessions.
During her weeks on the receding lake shore, she composed irreplaceable, a collective praise poem for great Salt Lake, containing over 400 lake-facing voices. The book was published in fall of 2024 by Moon in the Rye Press. The ode is a community cry for the full restoration of the ecosystem.Learn more about nan’s work:
Therese Berry (she/hers)
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Not much is known about the elusive and magnificent Therese. If you are lucky, you may catch her caring for her prize-winning heirloom tomatoes or taking flight with her fellow pelicans.
Therese served as Art Director of the 2024 vigil, designing and creating the first species-specific puppets such as the hand-puppet brine shrimp, brine fly, eared grebe, and avocet. Some of her most well-known puppets are the pelican, eared grebe, and bison.
Sav Pearson (they/she)
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Sav Pearson is a queer, chronically ill/disabled writer and community organizer from the unceded Lands of the Seminole Nation, today known as St. Pete, Florida. In 2020, they received their B.A. from Columbia University in New York. In 2025, they received their M.A. from the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. Sav researches the role of art, poetry, and performance in radical activist movements. As a practitioner-theorist, their work and worldview have been informed by disabled ecologies, Indigenized environmental justice, and emergent strategy.
In 2026, Sav is publishing three books. bloodsalt, a tiny red novel, is forthcoming from the lakewords micropress. microbialite manifestos: a radical movement anthology, is forthcoming from Torrey House Press. Reverence is Resistance, their first full-length manuscript, is forthcoming from the University of Utah Press. You can read more of Sav's work on Dark Mountain, Edge Effects, and Tilted House.
India Elliot (she/hers)
Chanel Sorenson (she/hers)
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India Elliott attends the University of Utah full time while working hard on the GSL crisis. She is very inspired by art as activism and incorporates those principals of community and grief-transformation in the rest of her life. She also co-leads the Youth Coalition for Great Salt Lake, a treasured partner of Making Waves.
Carson Tueller (he/him)
Supporting Artists
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Chanel Smith Sorenson, a Salt Lake City-based choreographer and performing artist, explores the complexities of science and nature to craft evocative narratives in dance theatre, experimental film, and visual media productions. Her current collaborations include choreography centered on activism to preserve Great Salt Lake. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, NY, and a Dance Post Baccalaureate from Hollins University, VA. She produced choreography in Washington D.C., Virginia, New York, France, and Utah. Chanel's solo exhibitions stretched across Auvillar, France, Washington D.C., Rockbridge, Virginia, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Chanel is a part of the Celebrate the Species team with Making Waves. Catch her at the Capitol helping to fly pelicans, grebes, and giving a spectacular bison dance!
Chrissy Bailey (she/hers)
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Chrissy Richards is a visual artist, educator, graphic designer, and multi-media maker with an evangelical zeal for the vital role of art and artists in environmental advocacy. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from BYU, has worked as a freelance graphic designer for two decades, and has five years of experience in art education. Just as comfortable with power tools as with paintbrushes, Chrissy loves getting her hands dirty with home renovations, building chicken coops, and digging in the vegetable garden.
As an art teacher at Canyon Rim Academy, she empowers children to make their voices heard through projects like creating a sea of 450 brine shrimp suspended from the classroom ceiling. When she’s not elbow-deep in clay, paint, drywall mud, or garden soil, she’s raising three kids, escaping modernity on long-distance backpacking trips, enjoying good food, family, and friendships, and rescuing treasures from thrift stores and dumpsters.
Sarah May (she/hers)
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Sarah May is the 2025 Vigil Director . She is a Salvadoreña artist, weaver, poet, and bruja who has long called the Lake home. As someone who lives in the in-between of multiple worlds and identities, Great Salt Lake is a sacred place where she is seen and held in all she is and where she cultivated her magic into the artist and storyteller she is today.
Sarah graduated from the University of Utah with her BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging and her MA in Community Leadership with an Emphasis in Art & Culture from Westminster College. Sarah has led designated spaces of healing, connection, and empowerment for BIPOC communities in Salt Lake City utilizing art, knowledge, and wisdom from BIPOC and Indigenous communities.
One of Sarah’s mediums of choice is cyanotypes and her cyanotype tapestry work led the way for the Making Waves Cyanotype waves, flags, and banners to be created embodying Great Salt Lake.
Learn more about Sarah’s work:
Anna Pocaro (she/hers)
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Anna Pocaro is a photographer and the founder and creator of In-Joy, a Native Garden Reclamation business based in Salt Lake City. Anna combines her love and advocacy for nature as the resident photographer for Making Waves.
Anna has always had a strong and deep connection to nature and Great Salt Lake in particular. She is motivated in her life and business to cultivate a relationship of respect and reciprocity with nature, always looking for opportunities to learn and understand the world through traditional Indigenous practices, and spiritual connection to the earth’s gifts.
Anna documented the 2024 vigil and art builds and will continue to document the 2025 vigil. Anna’s photos convey the ritual, ceremony, and jubilant love these waves, banners, and puppets represent and bring to the community spaces they were created to embody.
Learn more about Anna’s work:
Cael Crosby (he/they)
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Cael Crosby is a UVU student, poet, and community builder living in Orem, Utah. He is the president of the Grow the Flow chapter at UVU, which seeks to educate and excite students to better understand and defend the Great Salt Lake. His Grow the Flow Chapter has been able to assist in art builds, native tree plantings, cleanups, and more.
His recent poetic works center mostly around Queerness and the environment, including "Queer Naturalism," which was featured at the 2024 Queer Spectra Arts Festival. As a student, Cael is researching Deaf Studies and is conversationally fluent in English and ASL, while working towards becoming an Interpreter.
Cael is a part of the Celebrate the Species team with Making Waves, widely known as the “Head Brine Shrimp”. He is so excited to work with Making Waves and help people find right relationship with Great Salt Lake.
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Carson Tueller is a coach, speaker, and writer whose transformational work explores our notions of freedom, identity, and radical self-discovery. His work began when the trajectory of his life changed at 23 years old - not only did he come out and leave his lifelong Mormon faith, but he was also injured in an accident that left him paralyzed. Carson took what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge, and turned it into the foundation of his thought leadership and work in transformation.
Amy Brunvand (she/hers)
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Amy Brunvand is a librarian, environmental activist, and writer in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has an undergraduate degree in geology that taught her to see deep time. Her children tease her because she writes poetry about brine shrimp and talks to rocks. She is currently the Brine Shrimp Accordionist for the Great Salt Lake Vigil.
Many years ago on a whim she bought a small button accordion at Accordion-O-Rama in New York City and taught herself to play. The accordion is raucous and loud even without amplification so it comes in handy for music to Celebrate the Species. In their visionary book, "Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs" Eli Nixon writes (all caps), "DON'T BE FOOLED INTO THINKING RECORDED MUSIC WILL SOUND BETTER. It might sound better but it will suck the life out of your parade, pageant or play." This is true.
If you have an instrument, come play with us!
John Meier (he/him)
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John Meier, an Emmy award-winning documentarian who has earned accolades for producing roles on "This is Utah" on PBS Utah. His debut producing role on "Llama Nation" achieved acclaim at national film festivals, winning the Audience Choice Award at the Omaha Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Utah Film Festival. Passionate about the environment, John employs storytelling to reconnect people with their surroundings.
Throughout his career, he's dedicated time to document Utah's pressing issues. John aims to inspire a deeper connection between individuals and the natural world, fostering a greater appreciation for our environment at this time of imperiled waters and ecosystemic collapse.
John has been documenting the vigil for Great Salt Lake since 2022. He has been working on a documentary about the vigils called “Skymirror”.
Learn more about John’s work:
Guest Artists
Eli Nixon (they/theirs)
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Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist.
They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, parades, pageants, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, and the more-than-human world to create performances, installations, and civic choreography on street corners and stages.
For 20 years Eli has also been concocting theater and parades with schools, senior centers, libraries, and addiction recovery and mental health programs. Eli’s current creative efforts include identifying opportunities to dismantle Manifest Destiny, foster intra and interspecies kinship, probe the ethics, perils and possibilities of anthropomorphization, and parent a 13-year-old human.
Eli has collaborated with Making Waves since 2023, their book Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs is a huge inspiration for Making Wave’s art, species-specific puppets, and Celebrate the Species. They led an art build creating the first brine shrimp and an art build in collaboration with Zoe P Wagner to create large-scale pelican puppets
Learn more about Eli’s work:
Zoe Wagner (they/them)
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Zoe P Wagner is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay area, CA. They primarily work in printmaking and paper mache, with an emphasis on large-scale puppetry. Their work tends to be inspired by the natural environment and is moving towards the world of activist art.
Zoe co-led an art build with Eli Nixon designing and creating the four large-scale pelican puppets.
Learn more about Zoe’s work:
Photos of Our Flock
Featuring Anna Pocaro Photography
Jeri Jonise Photography
