2025 Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference Teachers and Speakers
The Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference is an annual event that gathers people who are passionate about nature, art, science, curiosity, and wonder to share ideas, learn from each other, support each other, inspire each other, and have fun together in nature’s beauty.
We are so grateful to the stellar team of 30+ teachers, journalers, writers, authors, artists, and thought leaders in nature, nature journaling, nature writing, visual thinking, and conservation, who will share their skills with the community. Learn more about each speaker by clicking their photos below.
NOTE: The list below is in alpha order by last name. Our teacher and speaker team is subject to change.
Meet our Teachers and Speakers—Click each photo for bios.
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Roland Allen
Roland Allen is the author of The Notebook, a History of Thinking on Paper, the first full account of a remarkable yet often overlooked invention, which has been widely praised. In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. In his book, Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive – and happier. He studied at Manchester University and works in book (and notebook) publishing. He has spoken about notebooks in three countries – including at London’s Linnean Society – and lives in Brighton, UK.
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Charlotte Belland
Charlotte Belland is an illustrator, animator and educator who specializes in animal gesture drawing. Chair and Professor of Animation at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD), Charlotte established an on-campus animal ambassador sketching program that creates a jubilant and respectful space for artists of all ages to sketch animals close-up. From wolves to miniature horses to insects to a variety of birds, artists can see and draw comparative anatomy in-action. Expanding her work to 3D, Charlotte created a herd of zebras that were 3D printed in “color” and exhibited at the S. Dot Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. As part of her 2024 CCAD Faculty Sabbatical, Charlotte recently self-published Draw All the Animals, a how-to book that she needed when she was a young artist.
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Michael Boardman
Michael Boardman is a Maine-based avid naturalist with lifelong interests in wildlife, hiking, kayaking, and artwork. To create his field sketches and wildlife art, Michael works mostly in watercolor in the field, painting when time permits or field sketching when not. Some amazing artist residencies opened the doors for his sketching and wildlife observation, in his home state of Maine and Alaska, including at Hog Island Audubon Camp and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He was a 2010 Visiting Artist at Baxter State Park and a 2012 Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park. In 2015, he was in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska for the Voices of the Wilderness residency. You can see his work at Maine Audubon in Falmouth, ME.
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Alex Boone
Alex Boon is an artist and nature journaling educator from East Devon, UK. He earned a PhD in environmental science before working in postdoctoral research and scientific communication roles. In 2016, Alex left academia, moved to the rural south-west of the UK, and started his first nature journal. He now teaches both online and in-person workshops and courses and he is active on YouTube and Instagram. His style is inspired by the British tradition of artists recording nature, particularly Edith Holden, Beatrix Potter, and Charles Tunnicliffe. His mission is to promote the wider uptake of nature journaling in the UK.
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Bethan Burton
Bethan Burton is an artist and environmental educator from Brisbane, Australia. Since keeping her first nature journals during university field ecology courses, Bethan has developed a deep and joyful practice. She is the founder of International Nature Journaling Week, a global event that brings people together as a worldwide community with a shared passion for nature and creativity. She is also the host of the Journaling With Nature podcast, where she explores the joys of nature journaling through conversations with creatives from around the world. Bethan loves to combine creativity with her passion for gardening, and she has found that garden journaling has helped her become a better gardener, and a more connected and joyful steward of her home patch.
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Gargi Chugh
Gargi Chugh, a data scientist by day, stumbled into nature journaling in 2018 as a fun weekend hobby. What began as simple sketches and quiet moments outdoors with a kind and curious community soon opened her eyes to the interconnectedness of nature around her. The more she noticed, the more she cared. That sense of wonder turned into a deep love for the natural world and a desire to protect it. Nature journaling quickly became her favorite way to connect, reflect, and give back. Today, Gargi runs a Nature Journaling Club in San Francisco with her partner, and has led several field outings at the Morro Bay Birding Festival and the Presidio Field Station. She loves playing with different journaling techniques that spark curiosity, encourage exploring relationships in nature, and bring out our inner “I wonder” kid. Through her work, she hopes to help others fall in love with the small details, the big questions, and the quiet magic of nature.
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Christian Cooper
Christian Cooper won an Emmy award as the host of the National Geographic TV series Extraordinary Birder, and he is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Better Living Through Birding, through which he spreads “the gospel of birding.” An advocate for equality for queer people, justice for Black people, and birds for all people, he serves on the board of NYC Bird Alliance, where he works to connect people to nature in an urban environment. A former Marvel Comics editor and writer, Christian combined his passions in the Black Lives Matter graphic short story, It’s a Bird, from DC Comics and continues to seek synergy at the intersections of storytelling, progressivism, and environmentalism—including with his newly released children’s book: The Urban Owls: How Flaco and Friends Made the City Their Home.
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Maria Coryell-Martin
Maria Coryell-Martin, founder of Art Toolkit, is an expeditionary artist in the tradition of traveling artists as naturalists and educators. Her travels have brought her face-to-face with polar bears, leopard seals, emperor penguins, and narwhals. She believes in art as a tool for exploration, observation, and scientific inquiry, and she often collaborates with scientific teams. In the field, she sketches with ink and watercolor, and collects multimedia recordings to build her palette of place, a record of experience, climate, and color. She develops this work into studio paintings, presentations, and workshops for audiences of all ages to cultivate observation, scientific inquiry, and environmental awareness.
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Joris De Raedt
Joris De Raedt is a Belgian-based scientific illustrator, wildlife artist, and graphic designer visualising the wonders of the natural world. With his illustrations, Joris aims to connect people with the natural world in order to encourage respect towards nature and to show species and ecosystems worth saving. Growing up in a family where exploring nature and observing wildlife was always the focal point of every holiday, Joris has been sketching nature for as long as he can remember. His awards and prizes include Graphic Design Award, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, 2011–2012 and World Illustration Awards 2023. His illustrations can be found in several books including The Little Owl – Population Dynamics, Behavior and Management of Athene Noctua 2nd Edition, and a collaborative book with his father, Roofvogels en uilen van Noordwest-Europa.
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Linda Feltner
Linda Feltner is an award-winning nature artist, educator, and author. She combines the creativity of artistic design with scientific accuracy. Her areas of expertise include painting and drawing, teaching workshops, guest lecturing, guiding birding and nature tours, and maintaining a flourishing freelance business in fine art and interpretive illustration. Linda has been an instructor for the University of Washington Scientific Illustration Certification Program, and currently teaches for the Art Institute of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Her books include Drawing Nature: The Creative Process of an Artist, Illustrator and Naturalist and Brittle Stars and Mudbugs: An Uncommon Field Guide to Northwest Shorelines and Wetlands. Linda’s aim is to provide a spark—to awaken curiosity and invite questions, to promote an appreciation for the complexity of nature and to foster a desire to protect it.
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Tony Foster
For more than forty years, British artist-explorer Tony Foster has painted en plein air, a practice that has taken him to wild places around the world. Foster documents the experience of his travels moving slowly on foot or via canoe or raft to encounter flora, fauna, people, and objects, recording his observations through daily diary notes and legally collected souvenirs that are essential elements of his artworks. His skill as a watercolorist has enabled him to articulate the beauty and physical experience of being in nature’s most remote places and has led him to create thematically related series of paintings, or Journeys. Since 1982, Foster has completed 18 Journeys, including his most recent, Watercolour Diaries from the Green River, which began its U.S. tour in May 2023 at the Whitney Western Art Museum in Cody, Wyoming. Foster’s artworks offer detailed and powerful insights into place and, in their specificity, encourage audiences to marvel at nature and encourage them to preserve and protect it. Tony Foster’s Journeys have been shown at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT; Royal Watercolor Society, London; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Royal Geographical Society, London; Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; and The Foster Museum, Palo Alto, CA.
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Rosalie Haizlett
Rosalie Haizlett is an illustrator who creates captivating paintings that celebrate the hidden wonders of the natural world. Haizlett has been an artist-in-residence at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the National Audubon Society, and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. In 2022, she was awarded the Eckelberry Fellowship for distinguished wildlife illustrators. The author of Watercolor in Nature: Paint Woodland Wildlife and Botanicals with 20 Beginner-Friendly Projects and Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains, she lives on the edge of Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.
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Roseann Hanson
Roseann Hanson is co-founder, operations manager, and treasurer of the Wild Wonder Foundation and co-founder and logistics director of the Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference. She has worked around the world as a professional naturalist, author, conservationist and expedition leader; she has kept science-based nature and field notes journals for 40 years; and she has taught more than 150 online and in-person nature journaling, writing, and field arts classes. She is the author of Nature Journaling for a Wild Life, an 8-week guided course for beginners, and her latest book is Master of Field Arts (2022), a deep-dive into becoming a master naturalist and field artist. She has also authored a dozen natural history and outdoor books, and her work has involved thousands of miles of overlanding on five continents. She studied journalism and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, and has worked in the American Southwest, Mexico, and East Africa as a conservationist, naturalist, and writer. Roseann enjoys integrating conservation, science, outdoor skills, and cultural awareness into her work. She is an elected National Fellow of the Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of her conservation and science communications work. She established the trans-disciplinary Art & Science Program at the 117-year-old Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, part of the University of Arizona College of Science, and currently teaches through her own Field Arts Institute.
http://www.exploringoverland.com/fieldarts
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Sushma Hegde
Sushma Hegde is a self-taught artist and author living in Luxembourg. Sushma loves painting flowers and landscapes, drawing inspiration from the nature around her. She aims to make painting easy and fun, helping more people find joy in creating art. She is the author of the bestselling book, Wildflower Watercolor, which guides readers through her painting process and encourages them to appreciate the beauty of nature’s imperfections. Sushma loves spending time outdoors, and she often goes on hikes with her art supplies, ready to paint whenever inspiration strikes.
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Verena Hillgärtner
Verena Hillgärtner is a Berlin-based artist, nature educator, and author with a deep passion for uncovering the wild wonders hidden in plain sight—especially in cities. With a background in art education and wilderness pedagogy, she founded Wieder Wilder Werden (“Rewilding Ourselves”) in 2020 to help people rekindle their curiosity for the natural world through nature journaling. Verena is especially drawn to the wiggly, slimy, smelly, and too-many- or too-few-legged beings—the ones that often go unnoticed, unloved, or unheard. Through open-minded observation and creative curiosity, she highlights their overlooked brilliance and helps others see them with fresh eyes. In 2023, she published Nature Journaling: Your Path to More Creativity, Connection to Nature, and Curiosity, the first German-language book on nature journaling, expanding access to this practice across the German-speaking world.
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Wendy Hollender
Wendy Hollender is a botanical artist, illustrator, instructor, and author whose internationally-recognized career has spanned decades. She is a leading expert in using colored pencils and watercolor pencils to create detailed botanical drawings and paintings.
Hollender’s illustrations have been published in numerous leading outlets including The New York Times and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her work was included in the 13th International Exhibition at Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, and in exhibitions at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the Smithsonian National Museum for Natural History. She is the author of many books including The Joy of Botanical Drawing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing and Painting Flowers, Leaves, Fruit, and More. Wendy is an instructor of Botanical Art and Illustration at the New York Botanical Garden and leads workshops at her farm in Accord, NY, as well as in many nature locations, botanical gardens, arts centers, and colleges around the country.
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Nishant Jain
Nishant Jain is an artist and writer living in Vancouver, Canada. After leaving in the middle of a PhD program in neuroscience, he began walking around the city with a sketchbook and fountain pen. This turned into an obsessive habit of what he calls “Sneaky Art,” a practice of quick sketching to capture life in his environment without drawing attention to himself. Nishant draws in cafes, on street corners, in parks, and in all kinds of public spaces. His art is a record of how cities work, and how millions of strangers live together in cooperation. Nishant’s work has been featured in news media around the world. He writes the popular newsletter SneakyArt Post, hosts the SneakyArt Podcast, and is the author of Make (Sneaky) Art, a forthcoming book about building a sketchbook habit.
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Jennifer Jewell
Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden. Her books include The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants; Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast; and What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds. Jewell’s greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersection between places, environments, cultures, individuals, and the gardens that bring them together beautifully–for the better of all the lives on this generous planet. Jewell regularly serves as a keynote speaker for horticultural organizations large and small across the country, including The Garden Conservancy, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, and The California Native Plant Society.
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Jane Kim
Jane Kim is a visual artist, science illustrator, and the founder of Ink Dwell. Her art career started when she was a little girl obsessively painting flowers and bears on the walls of her bedroom. She received more formal training with a BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and then attended California State University Monterey Bay, where she earned a master’s certificate in science illustration. She has created large-scale public art across the country, including the Wall of Birds at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and produced works for the National Aquarium, the de Young Museum, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, and more. She is the creator of the Migrating Mural campaign, a series of public installations that highlight wildlife along migration corridors it shares with people. She still enjoys painting flowers and bears, though nowadays she doesn’t get in trouble for painting on the walls.
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John Muir Laws
John Muir Laws (aka Jack) is a principal leader and innovator of the worldwide nature journaling movement and the co-founder of the Wild Wonder Foundation. As a scientist, educator, and author, Jack helps people forge a deeper and more personal connection with nature through keeping illustrated nature journals and understanding science. Jack has kept nature journals since he was a child. As a dyslexic, Jack struggled in school. He found his place and delight in learning through spending time in nature and keeping notebooks of his observations, discoveries, and adventures. Trained as a wildlife biologist and scientific illustrator, he now observes the world with rigorous attention and awe. He looks for mysteries, plays with ideas, and seeks connection in all he sees. He has found that attention, observation, curiosity, and creative thinking are not gifts, but instead are skills that grow with training and deliberate practice. As an educator and author, Jack shares ways to make these skills a part of everyday life. He is the author and illustrator of several books including The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling (also available in Spanish), The Laws Sketchbook, The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds, Sierra Birds: a Hiker’s Guide,Sierra Wildflowers: A Hiker’s Guide, and The Laws Guide to the Sierra Nevada. He is co-author with Emilie Lygren of How to Teach Nature Journaling.
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Rebekah Lowell
Rebekah Lowell is an award-winning author/illustrator and designer with a curiosity for the natural world. A survivor of domestic abuse, she is passionate about resilience, freedom, and hope. Her middle grade novel in verse, The Road to After, was a Junior Library Guild selection. Her illustrated picture book, Catching Flight, was long-listed for the World Illustration Awards. She earned her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA from Hollins University. She earned her Nature Journal Educator certificate through the Wild Wonder Foundation and is earning her certificate in Natural Science Illustration through RISD. Rebekah works part time on the Wild Wonder Foundation team, helping with social media, grant writing, and other projects.
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Jane Maday
Jane Maday is a lifelong artist, and has been a professional illustrator since she was fourteen years old. At seventeen, she was hired as a scientific illustrator at the University of Florida. After graduating from The Ringling College of Art and Design, she went to Hallmark Cards as a greeting card illustrator. She is an avid sketchbook and journal artist, and is the author of numerous art instruction books, including How to Journal Like an Artist. She is known for her “Journal for Joy” method, which focuses on noticing and appreciating the simple joys of the world around us. Her goal is to inspire and help people express their own creativity.
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Susan Magsamen
Susan Magsamen is the founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab), Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, a groundbreaking neuroaesthetics initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her body of work lies at the intersection of brain sciences and the arts—and how our unique response to aesthetic experiences can amplify human potential. Magsamen is the author of the Impact Thinking model, an evidence-based research approach to accelerate how we use the arts to solve problems in health, well-being, and learning. An award-winning author of numerous books, Magsamen is the co-author with Ivy Ross of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain On Art: How the Arts Transform Us. She is a Fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts and a strategic advisor to several innovative organizations and initiatives, including the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Brain Futures, Learning Landscapes, and Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America.
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Chloe Peters
Chloe Peters is an artist in London, UK. By day she is an animator, by night she is drawing, studying, and painting nature and animals. Chloe has always had a fascination for the natural world from a young age and processed this fascination through art. Over time she developed different styles; ranging from digital cartoons to traditional realism. In the last few years she has fallen back in love with painting and sketchbooking! Some of her favourite pastimes are heading into nature, museums, or zoos, with a sketchbook in hand.
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Ivy Ross
Ivy Ross is the chief design officer for consumer devices at Google and co-author with Susan Magsamen of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain On Art: How the Arts Transform Us. She has been a contributing author to numerous books, including The Change Champion’s Field Guide and Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organizational Change. Ivy was a speaker at Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit and has been cited by Businessweek as “one of the new faces of leadership.” In 2019, she was ranked ninth on Fast Company’s list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. A renowned artist, Ivy’s innovative metal work in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums. A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Ivy has also received the Women in Design Award and Diamond International Award for her creative designs. Ivy’s passion is human potential and relationships. Ivy believes in the combination of art and science to make magic happen and bring great ideas and brands to life.
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Kate Rutter
Kate Rutter is an avid nature journaler, urban naturalist, educator, and native plant enthusiast who enlivens nature-human connection through sketching, observation, and curiosity. A lifelong sketcher with an experimental and rambunctious visual practice, Kate’s education work spans online teaching; corporate and nonprofit workshops; conferences and events; nature journal workshops at public gardens, private gardens, and nurseries; and serving as adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Kate earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Wellesley College. She serves on the board of the Wild Wonder Foundation, and she is one of the illustrators of the zine, Your Quick Start Guide to Nature Journaling, and the creator of the zine, 7 Ways to Connect with Nature.
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Grant Snider
Grant Snider began writing and drawing as a child, creating pictures, poems, and stories from his imagination—often in collaboration with his twin brother, Gavin. His favorite books of poetry were Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein and Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child’s Book of Poems. In college, Grant began drawing comics for the student newspaper at the University of Kansas. After college, he started a weekly online comic strip, Incidental Comics, which was featured in the Best American Comics anthology and collected in the books The Shape of Ideas, I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf, The Art of Living, and Thinking About Thinking. His book Poetry Comics was named a 2025 ALA Notable Book and a 2025 NEA Read Across America selection. He lives with his wife and kids in Wichita, Kansas, where he works a day job as an orthodontist. His hobbies include cooking breakfast, reading, running, drawing, and redrawing.
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Dr. Nina Sokolov
Dr. Nina Sokolov is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the viruses that infect managed and native bees of California and considers herself a disease ecologist and an entomologist. She is interested in understanding how crop pollination events impact diseases in both managed honey bees and native wild bees. With her work, Nina aims to use her research to inform ecologically minded disease management strategies to protect pollinators. In addition to being a scientist, Nina is an artist who uses a range of mediums to illustrate the natural world. Armed with a microscope and pen in hand, she draws insects' unique and almost alien attributes. Illustrating trains her observational skills and gives her “the eyes to see” the microscopic differences between species. Since there are more than 1,600 species of bees in California alone, art is also an invaluable skill for her science.
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Amy Tan
Amy Tan is a bestselling novelist, essayist, and nature journalist. Her book is the New York Times bestseller The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Knopf, 2024), with a forward written by David Sibley. Her newest book The Backyard Bird Journal and Backyard Bird Deck will be available in 2026! She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2023 she received the National Humanities Medal. She has been a member of the Nature Journal Club on Facebook since 2016 and also has taken workshops with author, artist, and educator John Muir Laws, which led to her passion for nature journaling. She wrote the introduction to How to Teach Nature Journaling by John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren. She is the subject of the documentary, “Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir,” part of which was filmed at the first-ever Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference at Asilomar in Monterey in 2019, where Amy sketched with fellow nature journalers Fiona Gillogly and John Muir Laws. As part of her informal nature studies, Amy has served as a go-fer in field research with biologists, including one expedition that documented the existence of a single ant colony on Easter Island, and another study on the social system of a community of female rattlesnakes in Colorado that gather to protect their young. She is an instructor with Masterclass, in which she discusses in part how observing nature is similar to developing characters. Her passion for birds led her to joining the board of American Bird Conservancy, which is dedicated to conserving wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. Amy recently appeared in a New York Times online event with Christian Cooper on “The Joy of Birding,” and in 2022, she was the host of “Selected Shorts: Bird Stories,” held at Symphony Space in New York City and also live streamed. She is grateful to the Nature Journal Club and Wild Wonder Foundation for inspiration, resources, and encouragement.
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Vitor Velez
Vitor Velez, aka The Headlessketcher, is a wildlife illustrator whose intricate pencil and pen drawings celebrate the beauty of the natural world. Originally from Portugal and now based in Poland, Vitor blends scientific curiosity with artistic storytelling – drawing inspiration from old field guides, natural history books, and the spontaneity of sketchbook pages. Guided by a lifelong love of nature, his artworks are deeply personal. Each piece is embedded with his own handwritten research notes, serving both as a visual element and a record of observation. Through his drawings, he invites viewers into close, intimate encounters with the animals he portrays on his pages. When not at the drawing table, you’ll likely find him leafing through vintage encyclopedias, sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses of his creative life, or wandering the forest, soaking in its quiet and vibrant colours.
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Laura Watson
Laura Watson is a botanical artist based on Vancouver Island, Canada. Her lifelong love of plants began in childhood and continues to inspire her detailed watercolor botanical portraits and teaching practice. She holds a Diploma with Distinction in Botanical Painting from the London Art College and a diploma from the Society of Botanical Artists (SBA) in the UK. In 2015, Laura was accepted into the Botanical Artists of Canada (BAC). Her work centers on nature journaling, particularly her ongoing Native Plants Feature Series, which documents the native flora of the Pacific Northwest through intricate watercolor and ink illustrations.
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