Smriti Keshari is an Indian-American director and artist recognized for her bold approach to visual storytelling. Her work spans traditional filmmaking and art installations, often exploring themes that challenge mainstream narratives. Keshari’s projects have received support from prestigious institutions like the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. She is an artist-in-residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the National Theatre in London.

Join UNM and community organizations to learn about the work being done around nuclear issues in New Mexico. 

Alicia Inez Guzmán

Alicia Inez Guzmán was raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas on land passed down through many generations of women. Here, we have a word — querencia — which means love of homeland. This querencia is why she weaves histories of place, identity and land use into nearly all of her writing, including on the nuclear industry. As a staff writer for Searchlight New Mexico, a small non-profit news outlet based in Santa Fe, she have spent the last year working as a nuclear reporter, covering the expansion of the weapons industry at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This has been a particularly significant beat for her. She grew up thirty miles as the crow flies from Los Alamos and has borne witness to its Janus-faced presence. On the one hand, it’s allowed local Indigenous and Nuevomexicano families a chance at the good life. On the other hand, it has reaped devastating harms on both people and place. She holds a Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester in New York and currently lives in Santa Fe.

Her writing can be found in Searchlight NM, The Nation, The Guardian and Rolling Stone. Awards include a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2021 Society for Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award for excellence in journalism and 2024 MOLLY National Journalism prize in investigative journalism.

Students in the upper-level undergraduate architecture studio, “ARCH 402: A Tale of Two Deserts,” led by Associate Professor Nora Wendl, will share their design proposals–a combination of artifacts and architectural designs that intend to hold the history of the Trinity Test Downwinders. The students include: 

Daniela Escalante, Darren Charley, Eric Talavera, Isaac Reichsfeld, Isabella Abeyta-Jefferson, Josiah Leong, Joshua Harned, Lane McConnell-Hand, Mariam Seif, Natalie Ayala, Sarah Roman, and Thasneem Kothalabbai.

Daisy Atterbury

Lecturer III and Director of Undergraduate Studies

Daisy Atterbury (they/she) is a Lecturer III of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico where they teach courses in Queer Theories, Gender, Sexuality and U.S. Empire, and Poetics. Atterbury grew up in Shiprock and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and this context informs their writing and scholarship on "sex and space." Their most recent articles have appeared in publications including Post45 Journal, the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Jacket2, and they have a collaboratively written chapter forthcoming in the book Access, Equity, and Promises: The Third Current of Writing at CUNY in the 21st Century (WAC Clearinghouse 2024). 

Atterbury holds a PhD in English with emphasis in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality and 20/21st Century North American Poetry and Poetics from the Graduate Center, CUNY, an MFA in Poetry from Bard College MFA, and a BA in English from Yale. In 2022-23, they served as Donald C. Gallup Research Fellow at Yale University. As a doctoral candidate, they received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Public Humanities through the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. They have also been recipient of a Lost & Found Archival Research Fellowship and Legacy Fellowship from Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. 

Before arriving to the University of New Mexico, Atterbury taught in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and they continue to teach a specialized summer seminar for GWS majors at the University California, Berkeley titled "Gender, Women's Studies and Medicine," which examines the colonial and gendered aspects of US medicine in practice.

Atterbury's hybrid poetry/prose memoir, The Kármán Line, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming in 2024. The book explores queer sexualities and narrative theory in a journey to Spaceport America in Truth or Consequences, NM. Their second book (in progress), There's No Space in History, addresses writing in the nuclear context. The book aims to render visible the economic, social, and ideological structures governing social-spatial dynamics in the "American Southwest," which resists a strict knowability and mapability. The book dwells with the lived experiences and political representations of those writing about, within, and through US nuclear colonialism.

Kaitlin Bryson

Lecturer III, Art & Ecology, University of New Mexico

Kaitlin Bryson is a queer transdisciplinary ecological artist and educator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico [USA] concerned with environmental and social justice and multispecies thriving. She primarily works with fungi, plants, microbes and biodegradable materials to engage more-than-human audiences, while also facilitating human communities through ecosocial practice. Her practice is research-based and most often collaborative, highlighting the potency of working like lichens to realize radical change and justice. In 2019, Bryson co-founded The Submergence Collective, an environmental art collective focused on multidisciplinary projects that imagine more collaborative, creative, hopeful, and ecologically connected futures for our human species and the rest of the living world.

Bryson received her MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico in 2018, where she concurrently studied art and mycology with research in ecotoxicology. Currently, she holds a Lecturer III faculty position in Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico and is the Field Coordinator for the Land Arts of the American West Program. Bryson’s transdisciplinary teaching focuses on facilitating ecologically relational practices informed by queer and critical ecology and traditional ecological knowledge, to enroot decolonial, interconnected, contemporary environmental art practices.

She has worked on multiple land and bioremediation projects with Tewa Women United and Communities for Clean Water in New Mexico, USA. She has received support from the Lannan and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation(s) to create ecologically remediative artworks nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the 2022 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Arts Grant, as well as the 2022 Future Art Award: Ecosystem X from Mozaik Philanthropy, and a 2022 Fulcrum Fund from 516 Arts. Bryson has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and in Mexico, Ireland, and Nepal as well as in notable festivals such as Ars Electronica (AT) and Politics of the Machine (DE). Her artwork and activism have been featured in books such as “In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms”, by Doug Bierend and The New Farmer’s Almanac “The Grand Land Plan” and in the Autumn 2022 Edition of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. In April of this year, she was selected as one of the “12 Artists to Know In New Mexico” by Southwest Contemporary.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy

CNM, American Studies & Sustainability Studies faculty

UNM, PhD Candidate, LLSS

Eileen O’Shaughnessy, MA, is a nuclear abolitionist organizer, educator, and musician. For over ten years, Eileen has taught courses on nuclear issues, environmental and racial justice, and gender studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and the Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) in Albuquerque In 2016, Eileen co-founded Demand Nuclear Abolition (DNA)- a grassroots collective working to challenge the violence of the entire nuclear fuel chain via education, activism, and art. In 2023, DNA worked alongside a broad coalition to help pass State Bill 53, which prevents a company like Holtec International from building a radioactive waste dump without the consent of the people of New Mexico. She is completing a PhD in Educational Thought and Sociocultural Studies at UNM with a dissertation tentatively titled (Un)learning the Bomb: The Nuclear Contract & Public Pedagogy in New Mexico’s Nuclear Industrial Complex. As a professional musician, Eileen has also toured the U.S., Canada, and Europe with her original political folk band Eileen & the In-Betweens.

Nora Wendl

Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of New Mexico

Nora Wendl is an essayist, artist, editor, and associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches architecture studio and theory.

Wendl’s work, across scales and media, subverts the received narratives that underpin architectural historiography, engaging feminist archival practices to create essays, books, installations, photographs, and films that offer new forms and frameworks for historicizing the built and unbuilt environments. These works have been supported by the Graham Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, and National Trust for Historic Preservation, among other institutions. She has exhibited and published widely, and her most recent book, Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (University of Illinois Press, 2025), was shortlisted for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her recent public scholarship, such as “Trinity Fallout: Nuclear Downwinders in New Mexico” in Places journal, has taken up the question of nuclear coloniality: a subject she also frames in her upper-level architecture studios. From 2021–24, she was the Executive Editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.

Amanda Champion

Master’s Student, Department of Landscape Architecture

Amanda Champion is a candidate for her Masters of Landscape Architecture at UNM. She holds a BA in Biology and Environmental Studies from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA and hails from the Bay Area (Piedmont, California). Her Master’s Project examines the impact of the nuclear weapons industry on the landscapes and people of New Mexico and includes both a research paper and speculative design project. She strives to design landscapes that uplift regional history and create resilient ecosystems. She is a Bernalillo County Master Naturalist and loves to hike, bird watch and garden. 

Sofie Hecht

Master’s Student, Department of Communication & Journalism

Sofie Hecht is a documentary photographer born in Brooklyn, New York and based in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the past 6+ years. Her photographic work began in the documentary tradition and evolved into more collaborative projects with her queer community in Albuquerque, particularly through portraiture, documenting drag performances, and returning home to photograph her own biological family. Her interest in collaborative storytelling as well as the polarizing debates around New Mexico’s nuclear history then brought her to work with the Tularosa Basin Downwdiners’s Consortuium (TBDC) from 2022 onward to re-narrativize the traditional stories around the world’s first nuclear bomb that was detonated in Southern New Mexico in 1945. She has been working on a long term storytelling project with TBDC about the effects of radiation exposure on New Mexico’s downwinders and the ripple effects of collective grief and contamination in this area. She is currently a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the Communications and Journalism Department where she is writing, learning, photographing, and envisioning ways to understand water’s particular role in the nuclear industry’s contamination of New Mexican peoples, land, and bodies. Her thesis offers creative approaches to storytelling that convey water’s affective and metaphoric properties as a vessel for contamination and a source of life.

Travis Torres Thompson

MA student, Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies

Travis Torres Thompson is from Arroyo Hondo, near the town of Taos in northern New Mexico.  He is an artist, woodworker and carver, having built cabinetry and traditional furniture at shops in Taos and Seattle, Washington. Travis is a graduate student in Chicana & Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico and holds a BA from UNM with a double major in Anthropology and Native American Studies. Since 2023, he has been the Distinctive Native American Collections Fellow at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, where he assists with archival projects and generating new culturally appropriate models of managing archival content. His research focuses on community archives, storytelling, critical mystery studies, and nuclear culture; and is currently working on writing and illustrating a long graphic poem about nuclear colonialism and the nuclear industrial complex in New Mexico. 

Yoma Wilson

Master’s Student, Department of Art