A Miami-based investigative reporter, Mario Ariza wrote for The Atlantic, The Believer, The New Republic, The Miami New Times, and The South Florida Sun Sentinel. His first book, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe, evokes both the inequality in Miami and how climate change affects it. He is featured in Sinking Cities, a PBS documentary series on the threat of climate change.
An architect and city planner focused on climate change adaptation, Jeff Carney teaches studios and seminars on resilience design and planning at the building, neighborhood, and regional scale in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. He is also Director of the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) and the Florida Resilient Cities program (FRC).
Director of Innovation at the Office of Miami-Dade County, Ana Chammas helps advance tech strategy and digital transformation that drive the customer experience and make community impact. As a long-standing member of the FIU Kopenhaver Center Leadership Council in CARTA’s Innovation Labs + Incubators, she also mentors graduate students to find a place in the digital and communication spaces within the private sector.
Rodolphe el-Khoury is Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture. Trained as both a historian and a designer, he divides his time between scholarship, research, and practice. He is the author of numerous books on architecture and urbanism, including See Through Ledoux; Architecture Theatre, and the Pursuit of Transparency; Monolithic Architecture; and Figures: Essays on Contemporary Architecture. el–Khoury’s leads RAD Lab, a research unit dedicated to embedded technology and robotics aiming at enhancing responsiveness and resilience in buildings and smart cities.
Elaine Fiore is an environmental educator for Broward County Public Schools in South Florida and leads the Food Conservation Alliance which spearheads Food Waste Prevention Week.
In three years, under Elaine’s direction, Food Waste Prevention Week evolved from a state-based initiative into a national campaign planned by a team of leaders within the food reduction movement from across the country. The campaign is a multipronged effort to engage everyone to reduce food waste at home, work and in our communities.
A French landscape gardener and nurseryman, Eric Lenoir practices punk gardening, emancipated from tradition horticultural rules. His large ornamental garden Le Flérial in Bourgogne is his experimental lab where he invests as little time and money as possible. He is the author of several books, including Plantes aquatiques & de terrains humides and Petit traité du jardin punk.
A teacher and historian specialising in architectural theory, Sébastien Marot is one of the leading voices in the conceptualisation of landscaping and the design of rural environments. In 2019, he curated the exhibition “Taking the Country’s Side: Agriculture and Architecture,” for the Lisbon Architecture Triennal. He wrote several publications dedicated to critical thinking on urbanism and cities, such as Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory in 2003.
Muriel Olivares is Co-founder of Little River Cooperative. She was born in Argentina and immigrated to Miami in 1990. She is a self-taught plant nerd with an art background. Small business ownership keeps her on her toes, while motherhood and nature are her passions.
A French lawyer before becoming a journalist for Le Monde diplomatique, Geo, and National Geographic, Guillaume Pitron is the director of several documentaries related to the exploitation of raw materials, in particular Boomerang: the dark side of the chocolate bar, Rare Earth: The Dirty War, and The Dark Side of Green Energies. After six years of investigation, in 2018 he published a geopolitical book, focused on economic, political, and environmental issues related to the use of rare metals: The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side Of the Energy Transition and Digitalization.
Assistant professor at the Institute of Environment of Florida International University, Cara Rockwell has worked in South America for 15 years, with community forest managers, local NGO and government representatives to develop sustainable forest management strategies. In South Florida since 2015, she is focusing on ecosystem services in urban agroforestry systems as well as recovery of native ecosystems post-disturbance.