🌿 Earth Rise Teaching Collective

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    Skye Ruozzi

    Skye Ruozzi is a licensed architect and artist whose practice lives at the intersection of ecological design and spatial justice. She brings two decades of experience bridging technical rigor with visionary experimentation, using local materials and participatory building to cultivate shared knowledge. What drives her is a belief that the spaces we create together can be both beautifully crafted and deeply rooted in community.

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    Brice Gutshall

    Brice Gutshall is an architect from in Lafayette, Louisiana, with a background in cultural and institutional projects. A 2024 NOMA Future Faces Fellow, she brings technical expertise and a commitment to community centered design. Her graduate research on architecture's role in advancing generational equity shapes her approach to building spaces that honor both people and place.

  • Cassidy Creek

    Cassidy Creek is an artist and educator whose work spans objects, installations, and drawings. She led the oyster lime experimentation and teach in during the 2025 Earth Church workshop, guiding participants through the process of turning oyster shells into lime for plaster. Her hands on experiment in circular systems demonstrated how waste from local seafood consumption could be transformed into a regenerative building material, connecting the Gulf Coast's fishing culture to natural building traditions. Through her teaching, participants learned not only the technique of making lime, but a deeper lesson about material kinship and the potential for small scale experimentation to open new possibilities in bioconstruction.

🏡 Habitat Recovery Project

Earth Rise Collective is an initiative of Habitat Recovery Project.

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    Alyssa Portaro

    Alyssa Portaro is founder, visionary, and community organizer. She is an environmental advocate passionate about community focused conservation and regenerative land stewardship. An NWF certified EcoLeader, she spearheads Habitat Recovery & Kindness Project, leading initiatives in land restoration, wildlife rehabilitation, and ecological care. Based in Louisiana, she transforms her 24 acre homestead into a thriving center for sustainable agriculture, education, and community connection.

  • A person smiling while holding a microphone, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with sunglasses resting on top, and a floral-patterned jacket over a white shirt.

    Misha Mayeur

    Misha Mayeur is a multifaceted artist and community advocate from New Orleans. As Deputy Director of the Habitat Recovery Project, she co-leads environmental initiatives, and through the Gulf Rising podcast, she amplifies the stories of the Gulf Coast. Her work weaves together art and community building, including organizing workshops on sustainable building practices with Earth Rise Collective. Misha helped lead Little Shrimp and the Terrible Noise, a giant puppet project that highlights the impacts of LNG development on Louisiana's coast through creative public performance. She supports community science initiatives that equip local fisherfolk with tools to document environmental change, ensuring that those whose livelihoods depend on the health of the coast are central to the movement for its protection.

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    Iffy Roma

    Iffy Roma is a multidisciplinary performance artist, producer, and embodiment facilitator. She integrates fire, acrobatics, poetry, and dance to create immersive storytelling experiences and works with the Habitat Recovery Project to support community based ecological restoration. Beyond the stage, Iffy empowers youth through creative expression and environmental engagement.

🤝 Collaborators

  • Maury Johnson

    Maury Johnson is a farmer and activist. He shared with us cultural heirloom native corn of the Ponca Tribe, known as the Seeds of Resistance. It was named so for its planting to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. This sacred corn connects struggles against extraction across the Great Plains and the Gulf Coast. Maury offered both the seeds and their story, inviting participants to plant and carry forward this living legacy.

  • Charlsie Shaver

    Charlsie Shaver is the owner of Chickadee Natives, a New Orleans based nursery specializing in locally adapted native plants. A former landscaper, she now spends her time collecting seeds from imperiled populations across the region and propagating them to preserve genetic diversity. She led a plant identification walk during the 2025 Earth Church workshop, sharing her deep knowledge of native plants and their role in supporting resilient local ecosystems.

🎥 Contributing Archivists

  • Chelsea Williams

    Chelsea Williams captured the story of the Earth Church through video interviews, preserving its unfolding narrative for years to come.

  • Jeremy Boglia

    Jeremy Boglia lent his excellent photography skills to document our work, gifting us with images that carry the warmth and texture of our time together.

  • Beka Economopoulos

    Beka Economopoulos documented the 2025 Earth Church workshop, helping to archive the build process and community gatherings through photography and storytelling. Beka Economopoulos is a co-founder and Director of The Natural History Museum, a traveling museum without walls that collaborates with frontline communities to create new narratives about our shared history and future.

  • Jason Jones

    Jason Jones contributed his documentation skills to capture the Earth Church workshop, including the roof build and cupola construction.

🍂 Past Teaching Members

  • Arica Wyche

    Arica Wyche is a Senior Derivatives Analyst at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore, Maryland, specializing in quantitative finance and derivatives trading. She began her career as a Chemical Engineer at DTE Energy and has completed research and internships in energy and environmental consulting. Beyond finance, she brought a deep passion for natural building and sustainable architecture to the collective, combining technical expertise with hands on ecological design.

  • Vanessa Baskin

    Vanessa Baskin is a gardener and educator who contributed her teaching and energy to the collective in its earlier workshops. Her presence and botanical knowledge left a lasting imprint on the Earth Rise community.

  • Ocean Clark

    Ocean Clark has been a full time portrait artist since 1997, creating custom artwork for tens of thousands of clients over his career. He brought his skills and experience to Earth Rise Collective by teaching participants about felling and milling, sharing traditional techniques for working with wood sourced directly from the land.