Work — Carolyn Finney

Carolyn Finney gather around with people like on a focus group.

My work, like my story, is always evolving. I do public speaking & performance, facilitation & consulting, writing, and teaching. In every case, I draw on my background in theater, my formal education & my lived experience. At the heart of all of my creative endeavors is my love for people, this place & our collective possibility. Here’s a taste of what I’m dreaming on now.

I am working on a performance piece about an imagined conversation between myself and John Muir entitled The N Word: Nature Revisited. I am also gathering stories for a new book (creative non-fiction) that takes a more personal journey into the very complicated relationship between race, land & belonging in the United States. In 2021, I workshopped my performance piece as part of a Mellon residency at the New York Botanical Gardens and worked with an award-winning filmmaker who is including my family's story in an upcoming documentary on humankind’s complex relationship with trees (Trees and Other Entanglements directed by Irene Taylor recently premiered at MountainFilm in Telluride and will be on HBO in late fall/early winter of 2023). I continue to engage with people around the country virtually and in-person and am thrilled to be an artist/scholar-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College.