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.
Our Team
Nan Seymour (she/they)
-
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)
-
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 for 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 original pelican, eared grebe, and bison.
Sav Pearson (they/she)
-
Sav Pearson is a writer and community organizer living with long covid. They received their B.A. from Columbia University and their M.A. from the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. Sav researches the role of art, poetry, and performance in social movements. This year they are interested in the role of griefwork & deathwork in activism. As a practitioner-theorist, their work and worldview have been informed by disabled ecologies (Sunaura Taylor), Indigenized environmental justice (Dina Gilio-Whitaker), and emergent strategy (adrienne maree brown).
In 2025, Sav published a tiny red book called bloodsalt. In 2026, they published an anthology called microbialite manifestos: revolutionary voices for Great Salt Lake. Sav’s first full-length manuscript, Reverence is Resistance, 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)
-
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.
Sustaining Artists
-
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 Richards (she/hers)
-
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.
Erin O’Farrell (they/she)
-
Erin O’Farrell is a communications strategist, scholar, and writer based in Soonkahni/Salt Lake City.
They hold a BA in Environmental Studies from Bates College and an MA in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah.
Erin is passionate about environmental justice, anti-colonial placemaking, and communication. They seek to engage in projects and movements that align with these lenses.You can read Erin’s work in Edge Effects, Resilience, VT Digger, Juneau Empire, and forthcoming in books published by Routledge and the University of Utah Press. They have been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alaska Fellows Program.
Kara Komarnitsky (they/she)
-
Kara Komarnitsky is an interdisciplinary artist who seeks to make visible the invisible forces that underlie our lives and connect us to each other – envisioning and transforming our collective idea of where our bodies end and where they begin. She has performed with Myriad Dance Company, Fem Dance Company, and Repertory Dance Theatre amongst many community shows; her work has been presented at Illuminate Salt Lake Festival, Utah Dance Film Festival, Queer Spectra Arts Festival, 801 Salon, Red Rock Dance Festival, Playground Dance Project, Material Gallery, and RDT’s LINK series; and she has been teaching movement practices for over a decade. Kara continually seeks out new avenues to deepen embodiment, connect to land, and cultivate wonder in her communities. Kara’s dance film, Lake Bodies (accompanied by lake words) explores ecological grief and how settler colonialism and racial capitalism led to Great Salt Lake’s collapse.
The photo above is from a movement session with Phalarope and Lake Apprentice.
Sarah May (she/hers)
-
Sarah May 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 here:
Anna Pocaro (she/hers)
-
Anna Pocaro is a photographer and the founder 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 deep connection to nature and Great Salt Lake in particular. In her life and business, she cultivates relationships of respect and reciprocity with nature. She is always looking for opportunities to learn about the world from Indigenous teachers of traditional ecological knowledges.
Anna has documented the Vigil for Great Salt Lake since 2023. Anna’s photos convey the ritual, jubilance, and love these waves and puppets bring to our community.
Learn more about Anna’s work here:
Salina Marina / Cael Crosby
-
Salina Marina, also known as Cael Crosby, is a Drag Queen, Community Organizer, and ‘Ecovixen’ currently residing in the wave-made world. Her performances pair high energy dance with environmentalist messages. Whether she’s modeling recycled materials or adorned in waves, Salt Lake City’s conservation queen will always leave you thirsty for more! Out of drag, Cael is a poet, artist, and community organizer.
Amy Brunvand (she/hers)
-
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!
Guest Artists
Eli Nixon (they/them)
-
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 here:
Zoe Wagner (they/them)
-
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
