Gretchen Ernester Henderson

Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrated sciences through cross-pollinating creative and critical practices. The author of five books across genres, opera libretti and art media, her writings have been reviewed in The New Yorker, Guardian, TLS, and Literary Review, with interviews on NPR and BBC Radio.

Her commitments have included being a Faculty Fellow at the Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center, Co-Director of an NEH Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, Distinguished Speaker in Art History at Rutgers University, Hodson Trust-JCB Fellow in Creative Arts at Brown University, and Visiting Artist in Music at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology.

She has taught widely, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Opera America, and artist residencies, including the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing & Literature in Switzerland and the Women’s International Studies Center.

Recent awards include the 2023 Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency in New Mexico and a Lucas Artists Program Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center Center (2023-2026). Born and raised in California, she is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, also teaching eco-writing workshops at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, UA Poetry Center, and Randolph Lundine.

Gretchen’s book on Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (2023) is seeping into Dear Body of Water: a poetic water-harvesting project inviting people to write postcard-sized love letters to bodies of water to grow a chorus of care for watersheds across the globe.

View her works:

https://www.gretchenhenderson.com/

https://dearbodyofwater.poetsforscience.org/

https://brevitymag.com/current-issue/fallingwater/

About Fallingwater Institute

When Edgar Kaufmann jr. entrusted Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, he envisioned Fallingwater not only as a place where visitors would come to experience great architecture, but also where a deeper experience of art, design and nature might occur.

Kaufmann imagined that Fallingwater could become a place where artists, scholars, designers and learners might come to find inspiration from the building and its landscape while pursuing individual or group study. Today, the Fallingwater Institute, formally established in 2015, honors that vision by providing a stimulating location for creative collaboration and inspired thinking through immersive classes, workshops and residencies. By serving an international community through its innovative programming, the Fallingwater Institute works to create and disseminate new ideas that promote harmony between people and nature.