Senior Lecturer

Steve Hicks School of Social Work 

Gretchen (Ernster) Henderson is a Senior Lecturer at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and was a 2020-2022 Faculty Fellow in the Humanities Institute, focusing on Environmental Humanities. Based in creative writing and literature, her work has been shaped by interdisciplinary approaches across the arts, environmental studies, cultural histories, music, disability studies and health humanities, social work and public humanities. As an essayist, fiction writer, poet, librettist, and photographer, her work has appeared in Ecotone, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, among many others. A musician by training, she is interested in acoustic ecologies and communal practices of listening, meditation, and other processes to sound the gaps of cultural and institutional histories, to facilitate participatory spaces for social justice and equity. Her most recent book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023), grew from her 2018-2019 Annie Clark Tanner Fellowship in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, where she focused on Great Salt Lake and stories of watersheds in the climate crisis. She is the 2023 Aldo & Estella Leopold Writer in Residence (NM) and, with the UA Poetry Center, is collaborating on Dear Body of Water (2023-2024): a poetic water-harvesting project inviting the public to write love letters to water.

Founder & Artistic Director

Forklift Danceworks

From sanitation workers to firefighters, power linemen to maintenance teams, Allison Orr creates award-winning choreography with the people whose work sustains our everyday lives. Inspired by the beauty and virtuosity in the movement of labor, and building on her background in anthropology and social work, Allison has honed a methodology of ethnographic choreography that engages community members as co-authors and performers in the creation of large-scale civic spectacles. Challenging audiences to expand notions of dance and performer, her dances have been performed for audiences of 60 to 6,000+. A guest artist for numerous dance programs, Allison has been a Mellon Foundation Creative Campus Scholar at the Center for the Arts of Wesleyan University. Her work has been funded by the City of Austin, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Doris Duke Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the City of Venice, Italy, and numerous others. She has recently published a book, DanceWorks: Stories of Creative Collaboration, published by Wesleyan University Press. She holds an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Mills College and a BA in Anthropology  from Wake Forest University. Allison is a fourth generation Texan and lives in Austin with her husband and two children.

Ph.D Candidate

Cornell University

Born in Bogotá, Colombia and a long-time Ithaca resident, Carolina Osorio Gil completed her BA in Cognitive Psychology from Cornell University (2002) and an MA in Early Childhood Teaching and Curriculum with a concentration in Gifted Learning from Columbia University Teachers College (2010). She is an actress, director, chef, and community organizer and is the founder and former director of CULTURA Ithaca, a Latinx cultural organization in Ithaca, NY. Carolina's research focuses on the general themes of knowledge, power, and epistemic justice — and she centers indigenous and BIPOC scholars in her research and writing. She is interested in decolonial scholarship, and is involved in several interdisciplinary academic collaborations working towards decolonizing higher ed. Combining her training in pedagogy and theater, she is developing a story-based theater methodology for accessing and co-creating land-based knowledges and capabilities with campesina/o communities in Colombia and Mexico. In 2022, she joined the Human Development and Capabilities Association and is working towards contributing to participatory methods to operationalize Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach in the context of Latin American resistance movements to large-scale development projects.

Board of Directors Secretary

Indigenous Cultures Institute

María F. Rocha is of Coahuiltecan and Comanche heritage and is a member of the Miakan-Garza Band, a state-legislature-recognized tribe of Texas. She is a co-founder of the Indigenous Cultures Institute, a nonprofit organization in San Marcos that preserves the culture of Native Americans indigenous to Texas and northern Mexico, and served as executive director for 15 years. She currently serves as the Institute’s Secretary. At the Institute, she established the Indigenous Arts Summer Encounter for youth, which uses an Indigenous-based pedagogy and multidisciplinary arts to teach Hispanic students about their Native identity. Prior to her service at the Institute, Rocha worked for eight years as administrative director of Teatro Humanidad, a bilingual theatre company in Austin. Yana Wana’s Legend of the Bluebonnet has toured live and virtually throughout Texas, reaching thousands of students and families with the sacred story of her people’s history in Texas.