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.

Marketing Director

Born in Chicago, Illinois (land of the Anishinaabe, or the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations), Jennifer Yadira Barajas is a first-generation, bilingual latine of Mexican descent working to heal and decolonize her ancestral lineage by honoring her family's agricultural practices, curanderismo, and traditional cooking, while also practicing ancestor veneration, reconnecting with her indigenous Purépecha roots, and continuing to build more intimate relationships with herbs and our more-than-human kin.

Jennifer graduated from Texas State University in 2014 with a double major in journalism and English and has experience working as a music teacher and as a photographer, marketing director, and tour manager in the radio and music industry. With a passion to learn about and share more plant wisdom, ecology, history, and indigenous lifeways that have been erased by violence and colonization, Jennifer works at Herban Cura to help with creative marketing solutions and social media content. Her prayer is to make this knowledge and history more accessible to folks in order to support our collective healing and liberation.

Program Director, Living Library

mekdela maskal was born by Ethiopian and Eritrean parents who met while seeking asylum in Los Angeles, California. In addition to supporting Herban Cura, they work as the Engagement Director of a journalism collaboration called Covering Climate Now, and a model with HÉLÈNE.

While living in New York City, she helped launch THE CITY’s Open Newsroom project, an initiative that brought communities and journalists together in public libraries to build trust and make reporting a more collaborative process. 

In 2020, mekdela and collaborator, Sawdayah Brownlee, were selected to join The Strange Foundation's biannual Decelerator Residency Program right before the COVID pandemic hit. After a decade in NYC, she decided to return home to Grass Valley, California and was met with one of the worst wildfire seasons. She leapt into a journey repairing her relationship with fire and trained as a wildland firefighter. 

Inspired by the land, mekdela maintains a process-oriented art practice where she works with foraged clay, plants and minerals to make quotidian objects, sculptures and installations. She has collaborated with Bear Yuba Land Trust and California Heritage Indigenous Research Project on site and time specific pieces in Nisenan Territory.

mekdela graduated from New York University with an M.S. in Media, Culture and Communications in 2013. From there, she studied funghi with Herban Cura, decolonizing food systems with Soul Fire Farm, natural pigments with Wild Pigment Project, and completed a Masters in Engaged Journalism at The City University of New York. 

She is currently studying psilocybin-assisted group therapy with Gatherwell and facilitating workshops on repairing relationships through land, food, art and media. Learn more on love in the cracks. 

Graphic Design Director

Ashley Vaughn is a graphic designer and creative collaborator based in Portland, Oregon (land of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tumwater, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla). Growing up a first-generation Thai-Vietnamese American, Ashley actively explores and navigates how her culture and identity can be in constant relation with one another and the nuances that come with it. She explores and processes these intersections through her creative process, personal projects, and through cooking and sharing meals from family recipes.

Ashley’s focus is in the digital and print graphic arts, having received a B.A. in Graphic Design from Portland State University. Finding inspiration in different creative mediums such has photography, music, and hands-on graphic art processes, Ashley works to incorporate a multi-disciplinary approach to projects. With Herban Cura, Ashley collaborates with the team to bring creative materials to life.

Director of Collaborations

Kate Weiner is the Co-Editor of Loam, the publishing branch of the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education, as well as the Founder of Loam Library, a mobile library that seeks to bring the power of print to the people. She is a 2023 Editorial Fellow at the Center for Humans & Nature, a 2021 Artist/Activist-in-Residence at Boulder Public Library, and a 2018 Spiritual Ecology Fellow.

In collaboration with Kailea Loften, Kate is currently writing Compassion in Crisis, an immersive and intersectional field guide to navigating climate disaster (Heyday 2026). She is also working with artist Amirio Freeman on developing a second iteration of The Down to Earth Deck, a series of conversation cards curated to reignite ritual.

Kate graduated from Wesleyan University in 2015 with a double major in Environmental Studies and Anthropology and has certificates in Permaculture Design (Occidental Arts & Ecology Center), Community Herbalism (Rootwork Herbals), and Climate Change and Public Health (Yale School of Public Health).

Learn more at Through Trails.

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.