Meet the 2024 White Feather Farm Crew!
From left to right back row: Kris, Jonathan, Jackie, Celia, Jake, Bill, Muriel, Matt, Kiki From left to right front row: Sophia, Marcos, Celine (dog), Amanda (Kristen + Jess not pictured)
Our 2024 team is a mix of new faces + seasoned White Feather farmers and program staff. Everyone is full of enthusiasm and endless ideas - the energy is feeling special this year. We’re so grateful to have each and every one of them on board and we look forward to working together this season.
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For Marcos, joining WFF is the lifelong culmination of a personal love of farming, the arts and community building, plus a passion for science, innovation and education. He has a visible track record of impact across nonprofit leadership and informal education, and partnered with top-tier organizations in arts and STEM education, environmental preservation, and land stewardship to deliver accessible programming to diverse communities. Marcos joined GallopNYC, a program that serves New Yorkers with disabilities through therapeutic horsemanship, as Executive Director in October of 2022. Prior to his role at GallopNYC, Marcos served as the Director of Learning Experiences for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Zoos and Aquarium, overseeing educational programming efforts at the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, and New York Aquarium. He was the Executive Director of the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont, serving both Vermont and New Hampshire communities from 2015-2021. He has held numerous senior programmatic positions with nonprofit New York City organizations including Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, and the New York Hall of Science. He holds a BA inTheater from Rollins College, an MA in Theater from Hunter College, and a PhD in Urban Education from the Graduate Center of the City of New York.
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Bio coming soon!
Administration
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Celia loves immersing herself in the natural world around her and exploring with abandon. As far back as she can recall, she was growing vegetables in her grandmother’s garden in Lancaster and flowers in her mother's backyard in Philadelphia. At WFF, Celia oversees our feathered friends, manages the farm, and inspires our design and image work. She is passionate about sharing the beauty of nature through art and her murals, which often include chickens. Celia lives in Mt. Tremper and thoroughly enjoys her home in the Hudson Valley.
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Born in Kingston, NY, and raised in Saugerties. Since he was young, Jonathan has been captivated by nature—its beauty, mysteries, and what makes it thrive. He was taught the importance of organically grown foods and conserving our planet’s habitats and wildlife, leaving him with a feeling of a personal responsibility to do what he can to make a difference in the world, no matter the scale. Working with seeds for the past 10 years, although those first six years were coffee beans that were roasted, ground, and brewed to be enjoyed as a beverage, during that time he had the opportunity to learn about coffee farming practices and realized how intricate and versatile just one plant can be. This knowledge ultimately inspired him to join the farm crew to pursue a much more fulfilling career. Jonathan will keep growing as we do. This is his fourth year at the farm and his first year officially as White Feather Farm’s Greenhouse and Field Planning Manager. Continuing his duties of sowing and nursing the majority of our seeds for transplant, overseeing microgreen production, and collaborating with the crew to achieve another successful season.
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Amanda, originally from Rockland County, NY, has been living and working in the Catskill Mountains for nearly a decade. The natural world has been the epicenter of all of her passions and sources of inspiration. As a practiced EMT, it is no surprise that one of Amanda’s greatest areas of interest is herbalism and traditional plant medicine. Since living in the Catskills, she has been building her own medicinal garden and is committed to learning natural remedies for both acute illness and trauma, as well as chronic ailments. At WFF, Amanda is focused on expanding our cultivation of medicinal herbs and the knowledge needed in utilizing them. Outside of caring for our adored plants at WFF, Amanda, alongside Matt, takes care of our six honeybee hives. Even on the days when Amanda walks out of the bee yard with more stings than can be counted, she is enchanted by the complexities of beekeeping and is honored by the intimacy she shares with hives! If that wasn't enough, Amanda holds a deep excitement for expanding her understanding of biodynamics, permaculture, and natural farming techniques. She continuously strives to learn more about creating safe, natural alternatives to conventional pesticides and fertilizers, as well as integrating resiliency into landscape design, all the way down to soil biology!
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Bio coming soon!
Farm Leadership
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Muriel grew up in France bonding with nature in the Provence and low mountain Burgundy regions, where she obtained a Master’s Degree in Education and started her teaching career. After a ten-year hiatus training as a glass painter and subsequently working as a stained glass conservator, Muriel returned to education by joining the founding board of the International School of Brooklyn in 2004. As the school’s first education director, she set the foundation for ISB’s bilingual, International Baccalaureate curriculum framework, and went on to focus on curriculum development and teaching for the next two decades. Today, combining the roles of sustainability coordinator and art teacher at ISB, and education director at the White Feather Farm, Muriel’s goals are to provide every member of the community with opportunities to engage and connect with nature. She believes in the potential of each individual to restore and benefit from nature’s integrity and balance, and that every child deserves the key to re-imagine the future.
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Sophia Goode is a farm educator and farm crew at White Feather Farm in Saugerties, NY. Sophia is a forager, gardener, builder, self-taught mycologist, educator, and artist. She is committed to community, sustainable land use and ecological preservation. Science and art combined is her practice.
Education
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Bill Hilgendorf grew up in Boston MA, but fell in love with furniture design and interiors while living in Stockholm, Sweden, in search of his roots. After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in industrial design he moved to Brooklyn and co-founded the multi-disciplinary design firm Uhuru in 2003. For two decades Bill has employed design to tell the story of discarded objects and underutilized materials. In 2016 Bill co-founded Wilderkill a family retreat in the Catskill mountains as a place for small groups and families to connect with nature and learn more about their environmental impact. After at trip to Gothenburg Sweden in 2019 to study innovation in sustainability, Bill stepped back from day to day operations at uhuru in to focus his energy more directly on the climate crisis. With a growing obsession with Biochar, he co-founded Eldr Six as a launchpad dedicated to developing and showcasing upcycled carbon negative materials and products. With the singular focus on localized material innovation around Biochar he is working on the next generation of carbon sequestration and net-zero products. Currently Bill lives and works in between Brooklyn and the Catskills with his wife and fellow designer Maria Cristina and their two children.
www.williamhilgendorf.com
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Kris is a local herbarium artist and passionate nature advocate living just outside Woodstock, NY. She has been a plant fanatic for the 25 plus years since she moved to the Hudson Valley. Her goal is to collect and create a record of as many plants as possible in our local landscape. She has collected 100 plus plants just from her 5 acre property in Saugerties alone! Kris was awarded a grant through the Susanna Meyer Creative Arts Award in 2020 that culminated in a 2021 plant collection exhibit at The Lamb Center in Saugerties, NY. She is excited to offer a three week, hands-on herbarium workshop at White Feather Farm.
For over 25 years Kris has been overseeing greenhouses, gardens and indoor plant collections for both businesses and estates throughout the Hudson Valley. She spends her free time observing plants, where-ever they may be growing, by exploring in the woods, fields, mountain trails, stream sides, road sides, overgrown lots and even cracks in a sidewalk! Her goal is to offer her enthusiasm about plants to get people on their lifelong path of passion for the natural world around us! Kris has earned a certification in botany through The New York Botanical Garden and is a New York State Licensed Guide, her artwork is sold privately.
https://www.goflowergo.com/
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Brooke Singer is an artist, educator, and serial collaborator. In addition to being Director of Farm Innovation at White Feather Farm, she is also Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, where she has been on faculty since 2003. From 2018-2020. She was a research affiliate with the Groffman Research Group, Environmental Sciences Initiative, Advanced Scientific Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She was a former fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (2010–2011), co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media (2002–2008) and co-founder of La Casita Verde, a community garden and living lab in Brooklyn, NY (2013–). Brooke has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoMA/PS1, Warhol Museum of Art, The Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum of Art, Diverseworks and Matadero Madrid. She has been in residence at New York Hall of Science, Marble House Project, Headlands Center for the Arts, Helsinki International Artist Programme, among others. Her work has been funded by Patagonia, New York State Council on the Arts, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and Open Society Foundations, to name just a few. Her writing has been published in Big Data and Society, Radical History Review and Brooklyn Rail. She is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Microsoft and Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy.
Research Staff
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Born and raised in Saugerties, Jake is a modern renaissance man who can split rails for a new fence, oversee the building of a house, design a new chicken coop, cut down willows, a hemlock, fix a tractor, a greenhouse boiler, sap, boil, and produce maple syrup, lead kids education workshops, and much more. We can depend on Jake to keep the farm running smoothly with a twinkle in his eyes, a smile, and humor, much needed when the pipes freeze at 4 a.m. Coming from a long line of professional maintenance and property managers, as our Farm Operations and Property Manager, Jake oversees and manages the daily workings of our facilities, troubleshoots as challenges arise, and manages special projects as we continue to grow.
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Fresh out of Montana, Kristen comes to us with a BS in Hospitality Management and a Minor in Business Administration. She wears many hats for our organization. Jumping between our day to day finances to administrative coordination to venue and event coordination to capital project management, Kristen provides support to all of the departments here at WFF.