Michelle Matthews was born in Iran to a Chinese/Vietnamese mother and a Black/Caucasian father, and her family was among the last ones to be airlifted from Iran during the Islamic Revolution in February of 1979. Her father, once a minister from North Carolina, is a retired technical writer who wrote manuals for the B2 Bomber and Apache helicopter and taught her how to use Ventura Publisher when she was eleven. She grew up in Hawthorne, California. Traveling back and forth between her home and her high school in West Los Angeles, Michelle noticed how the quality of the landscape impacts the quality of life. A creative leader Michelle Matthews is an artist, designer, and photographer and has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA from the University of Southern California. She has spent most of her professional career working as a designer at nonprofit, cultural and advocacy institutions such as the ACLU, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Sundance Institute, host of the Sundance Film Festival and is founder of the Urban Ecology Conservatory.

In this episode, recorded in October 2022, Michelle reads from ‘In Search of the Lost River’ by Henry Cherry.