Jennifer Douglass

Jennifer has worked most of her adult life in conservation and agriculture planning with a focus on landrace species and how they effect the environment. She has an MFA in Painting from University of Arizona and has been a shepherd in Southwest New Mexico for twenty-three years. For the past three years, she was an Assistant Professor in Painting at Western New Mexico University where she won the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020.

As an artist she works in Social Practice, which is socially engaged art that is collaborative and often participatory. In her work, she addresses climate change, colonization, migration, ecological destruction, and species loss. Most recently she partnered with WNMU Cultural Affairs developing and implementing a workshop series titled, “Journey of the Storyteller-Notion of Place”. The interdisciplinary workshops explore the importance of art and social justice, and the role of the storyteller in deepening our connection to the living world.

As a Shepherd, Jennifer has expertise working with the churros and cultures that surround their history. She has spent most of her adult life devoted to understanding the role landraces like the Churro have in climate change mitigation. During the severe drought in 2017-18, she launched the Investments in Resilience project with a commitment to protect the landrace churro from starvation in the SW deserts. The projects’ major focus was to prevent the Churro in the SW from starvation during the worst of the drought but it also instilled hope and courage among the last remaining Pastoralists in the face of an imminent environmental disaster.

As a conservationist, Jennifer has devoted most of her life to protecting ecology in the West and creative ways of bridging ideologies between environmentalism and their human impact. She runs a women-based farm dedicated to conservation, restorative ecology and the preservation of the TrueChurro™. The farm is located along the Mimbres River and is on the edge of two of the largest wildernesses in New Mexico.