Academy Staff

Kia-Noelle Brown, MA

Research Coordinator

Kia is the Research Coordinator for the NYC Land-Based Healing Project, an oral history project centered around Black and other youth and elders of color’s stories about the impact of their involvement in NYC community gardens or farms. Passionate about facilitating reconnection and repair between humans, the land, and the other/more than human world, Kia is committed to kindling Black joy, curiosity, healing, and resistance through practices of connection guided by the natural world. For six years, as a Community Gardens Manager in Nashville, TN, Kia engaged community members, challenging societal pressures of hyper-individualism while addressing the complexities that come with unearthing hidden stories of the past and rekindling ties to the land. Central to Kia’s work is storytelling - crafting and cultivating spaces of transformation, connection, and power that allow individuals to listen to the stories of others and share their narratives.

Kia holds a masters in Transpersonal Ecopsychology from Naropa University. Outside her work at the Academy, she facilitates programming at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. She is a partner at Stories of the Land, a Nashville-based organization that helps steward the stories held within the soil in an effort towards education, land solidarity, justice, reparations, and rematriation.