Christina Catanese
Former AWE Art Group Lead
As the Director of Environmental Art at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education from 2014-2020, Christina oversaw all aspects of creating and implementing an environmental art exhibition program in the nature center’s 340 acres of forests, fields, and gallery spaces.
Christina has been involved in Lenapehoking~Watershed from its earliest stages, and considers helping to bring the project to life among the most meaningful experiences of her career. While at the Schuylkill Center, she served as the lead of the Alliance of Watershed Education's Art Work group and administered the project's lead funding from the William Penn Foundation.
Christina Catanese works across the disciplines of dance, education, environmental science, and arts administration to inspire curiosity, empathy, and connection through creative encounters with nature. She leverages her interdisciplinary background to organize art exhibitions and projects that are more intuitive, emotional, empathetic, creative, and accessible than traditional presentations of science. As a curator, she has a particular focus on facilitating land-based art projects that have real ecological impact. In her choreography, she embodies scientific and ecological processes, exploring how dance can distill processes that happen over long time scales into a human-scale moment. As an artist, she has participated in residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Signal Fire, Works on Water, and SciArt Center.
Attending the University of Pennsylvania, she has a Masters in Applied Geosciences and a BA in Environmental Studies and Political Science. Christina is recently based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after living in Philadelphia for 15 years, and growing up in Pittsburgh.
