Program Director, Communications, Medicine Crafting, Founder

Antonia Estela Pérez is a Chilean-American clinical herbalist, gardener, educator, community organizer, co-founder, and artist born and raised in New York City. Growing up in a first generation household existing at the intersections of land stewardship, education, and social justice, their passion for herbs and plant medicine bridges the relationships between rural and urban spaces. With over 10 years of education including environmental and urban studies at Bard College, Clinical Herbalism at Arborvitae School of Traditional Herbal Medicine, and learning with herbalists and elders throughout Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Thailand, Pérez facilitates workshops and produces events as the co-founder of NY based collective, Brujas, and Herban Cura: A space centering Indigenous, Black, Queer and Trans communities in the education of land connection. In addition to being a co-founder and facilitating workshops in spaces such as Reed, Stanford, New School, and MoMA PS1, Perez is a respected gardener who has helped in the initiation and development of food prosperity for marginalized communities, namely Salam Community Garden, Sweet Freedom farm, Bard farm, and Soul Fire farm. As a food and environmental justice educator, Perez’s work is rooted in their passion for sharing knowledge that interrupts notions of individualism and separatism from nature to grow towards collaborative and symbiotic communities.

Plants to the People Founder

Sebastián is a New York City native of Chilean ancestry. He is a passionate educator with teaching and learning experience in mathematics, hatha yoga, qi gong, somatic movement, and music.

Sebastián's background is deeply interdisciplinary. After majoring in bio-med in high school, he pursued an Economics BA at City College of New York. Two years into the program he simultaneously began the Jazz Performance Program for guitar, also at CCNY. Thereafter, he pursued his yoga teacher training, and permaculture design certification. Sebastián also studied in the Masters program at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he focused on Environmental Psychology and Social Theory.

The diversity in educational pursuits is a result of a lifelong commitment to searching for deeper levels of freedom through self knowledge and expansion. More recently, Sebastián continues to pursue various musical projects under the name Aya Yai, as well as teach math at LaGuardia Community College, and develop his knowledge and practice in dance, body work, and somatic movement therapies.

Photo Editor

Em is a white, queer, non-zionist Jewish creator of Ashkenazi descent, born and raised as a settler on unceded Lenape and Mahican territories. She lives and creates on Coast Miwok, Timucua, and Mahican territories.

Her work is a prayer, and focuses primarily on the expression of gender, care, and vulnerability, with an emphasis on connection with the more-than human world. She walks with a strong commitment to engaging and alchemizing inherited and embodied systems of oppression toward our collective liberation.

Her work is in the realms of art (B.A. in Photography, Bard College), interspecies and nature connection (Weaving Earth), wildlife tracking (Wilderness Awareness School), diasporic Jewish ritual practice, and botanical dyes.