Nastassja Noell (she/they) is a lichenologist who struggles to stay within the fenced pastures of science. As a biologist, painter, and writer, her work grapples with the collapse of ecosystems and the reality of living on stolen indigenous lands, and seeks to co-create futures that reconnect and heal.

Her practice involves wandering and connecting with a landscape, the habitats therein, and the varied lichens living there. As she connects with the ecological stories that lichen biodiversity patterns share (lichen species are like words on a page), she explore through drawings, paintings, and prose the varied expressions and ecological teachings that move through her. Her philosophy is that our imaginations are like unique musical instruments, instruments that are played by our surroundings and our experiences (albeit with our own unconscious filters). When she is in a particular location, she widens her imagination and lets it be played by the ecosystems, weather, lichens and other beings in a landscape, cultivating the relationship through art, prose, and movement.

Her creative writing and artwork have been published by the Dark Mountain Project and other venues; her flash fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize; and she is a recipient of the United Plant Savers’ Deep Ecology Artists Fellowship. She has led lichen biodiversity research projects throughout the Americas, co-authored the book Delmarva Lichens (Torrey Botanical Press), and her science writing has appeared in scientific journals as well as Radical Mycology, Patagon Journal, and NW Travel (see links to her publications here). Nastassja lives in the Southern Appalachians on the ancestral lands of the An-igiduwagi (Cherokee) People.