Science Art Exhibition
Bridging the Gulf: Intersections of Geology, Biology, and Environmental Justice showcases the succession and interconnectivity of geology, race, agriculture, marine biology, and change. This work bridges the gulf of our understanding of the connections between race and environmental change in the Gulf Coast region and beyond.
The works in this series portray these themes through a three-part story:
1. How the Cretaceous coastline created cotton fields;
2. Connections between race, agriculture, biology, and environmental justice, and;
3. The most burdened and least included groups: The proliferation of exclusion.
Supported by: Solomonoff Architecture Studio, Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia Office of Diversity and Inclusion, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia Arts and Sciences Graduate Council
February 9th, 2024 •
6 PM – 10 PM
Persona Studio
202b Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, New York
kailani.acosta@columbia.edu
About the exhibition
The goal of the exhibition is to connect how fundamentally intertwined race, culture, marine biology, and geology are through large-scale, artistic visualizations of maps showing contrast, change over time, and difference between places and objects over time. Stories of demographic and environmental change have been repeated many times throughout history and around the world. Legacies of change are tied to and reflected in landscapes.
Biography:
Kailani Acosta
Kailani Acosta (she/her) is a sixth-year Ph.D. student at Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, studying biological oceanography. She received her B.S. from Brown University in Environmental Science in 2016. At Brown, she worked in a variety of research labs studying terrestrial biogeochemistry, climate and policy, and socio-environmental succession of greenspace in Providence. Her broader research interests include nutrient cycling, microbial ecology, and ecosystem modeling. She is interested in understanding how nutrients vary and how they influence phytoplankton communities and larger-scale ecosystem nutrient cycles. She is passionate about increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM, and authored a peer reviewed article on lessons learned and best practices for creating a DEI report and task force in an academic space in the Journal of Geoscience Education (Acosta et al., 2022). She served as the elected Student Member-at-Large on the Governing Board of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) from 2021 to 2023. She is also an Early Career Liaison for the U.S. National Committee for the UN Ocean Decade.
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