co-Founders, creative directors & lead facilitators
Pınar sinopoulos-lloyd (they/them)
Pınar is an award-winning Indigenous multi-species futurist, mentor, consultant and eco-philosopher; co-founder of Queer Nature, an “organism” stewarding earth-based queer community through ancestral skills, interspecies relations and rites of passage.
Enchanted by the liminal, Pınar is a future transcestor of Quechua, Turkish and Chinese lineages. A central prayer that guides them is envisioning decolonially-informed queer ancestral-futurism through multi-species accountability and the remediation of human supremacy in the Chthulucene. Their prismatic writing is fed by this prayer and is rooted in multi-gender/multi-cultural/multi-racial parallel realities as a neurodivergent. They are in a lifelong apprenticeship to the ecotone of riparian systems.
Their relationship with queerness, hybridity, neurodivergence, Indigeneity and belonging guided their work in developing Queer Ecopsychology with a somatic and depth approach through a decolonial lens. As a survival skills mentor, one of their core missions is to uplift and amplify the brilliant “survival skills” that BIPOC, LGBTQ2SIA+ and other intersectional systemically targeted populations already have in their resilient bodies and stories of survivance.
They were the 2020 recipient of Audubon National Society's National Environmental Champion as well as R.I.S.E. Indigenous 2020 Art & Poetry Fellowship. Pınar is the founder of @indigequeers; founding Council Member of Intersectional Environmentalist; trans ambassador of Native Womens Wilderness; and a founding member of Diversify Outdoors coalition. They also are adjunct faculty at the WE Immersion at Weaving Earth and facilitate and design multi-day programs at Colorado College and the University of Colorado Boulder with their other half/co-visionary partner/co-founder of Queer Nature, So Sinopoulos-Lloyd.
IG: @queerquechua + @queernature
So sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them)
So is a white queer Greek-American naturalist, scholar, and “multispecies monk” who grew up in the northern hardwood forests of Alnobak territory (central Vermont). So worked as a seasonal shepherd throughout college and considers their life path(s) to be deeply inspired by the resilience and tenderness of cloven-hooved beings, who inspired them to question human-centrism and study the earth more closely.
The soul of So’s work is animated by confluences of ecology, identity, mysticism, & so-called “apocalypse.” So holds both a BA and MA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and Claremont Graduate University, where they focused most of their studies on Eastern Christianities, place studies, semiotics, and visual culture. Currently their work lies in the theory, praxis, and cognitive neuroscience of place-making through the lens of wildlife tracking. They have had their writing published by The Wayfarer, Written River, Loam, Nature is a Human Right, and forthcoming in Atmos. Their special interests are tracking, shepherding and ungulate ecology, multi-spectral photography, new media studies/cybernetics, being a spouse to their beloved, and trying to find socially responsible ways to info-dump. You can see more of their work at their “personal” site Apocalyptic Ecology.
Some of So’s awards and achievements include Track & Sign Specialist (Western Washington), and Expert Rifleman (Project Appleseed).
