About us
Our Goals
Our collective responds to the urgent need to cultivate a regenerative culture and economy in which human and more-than-human life can thrive. Our aim is to develop a shared understanding of the common characteristics of regenerative practice, and of how these can operate across scales, locations and disciplines. We ask: what are the elephants in the room? Which relationships within education, creative practices and broader systems need to be disrupted, and which need to be revitalised? Art and design practices, with their aesthetic, material, political and transformative qualities—have a vital contribution to make in this context.
Our focus centres on three interwoven themes: Creative Practices - regenerative ways of making; Regenerative Economies / Human-Inclusive Ecosystems - regenerative networks of exchange; and Education / Didactics - regenerative ways of knowing.
A growing number of (higher education) educators, researchers and practitioners co-curate, substantiate and support the content of our programme, while ensuring that the collective remains relevant, grounded and evolving. They are,
Core Team Members
Aldje van Meer is a senior lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy, specialising in educational development and research in new making practices for art and design. She has an MFA in digital media design and has worked as a cross-media artist and designer. She now coordinates and supervises research within the Stations, interdisciplinary learning environments for research through making. She has recently set up the Living Station, an educational programme and lab where students explore how to make and collaborate with ‘living’ and biological systems. Aldje is co-founder of Collective Compos(t)ing and continues to lead regenerative agendas within WdKA's research and development.
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Anke Jongejan is a senior lecturer and researcher at the School of Design, University of the Arts Utrecht. She recently co-developed a minor in art and ecology. She focuses on the knowledge created in the creative process and how the secret forces of creativity, reciprocity and interconnectedness can be a blueprint for being ecological. Anke is co-initiator of the minor Arts & Ecology whose curriculum revolves around students spending an entire semester developing an ecological project of their own.
Anthony Heidweiller is an associate professor at the Academy of Theatre and Dance but also an opera singer and former director of the Opera Forward Festival of the Dutch National Opera & Ballet. He is currently researching the relationship between regeneration and breath. Within the KUO’s Lifelong Learning group, he leads research on how to place regenerative arts education on the national sector agenda.
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Annemarie Piscaer is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Program at KU Leuven and a designer, researcher and lecturer at CARADT, St Joost. Fascinated by dust, both as air pollution and as a tangible consequence of human choices, she investigates the systems that drive these decisions. Through materials and craftsmanship, her work seeks to unravel and illuminate these complex dynamics.​
Dorine van Meel is an educator at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she is also a researcher connected to the platform Urgent Ecologies. Between 2023 and 2025, she directed Planetary Poetics, a master’s programme at the Sandberg Institute focused on the ecological crisis and on the ways cultural practitioners can engage with, respond to, and intervene in it. Dorine is based in Brussels and works as an artist across moving-image installations, performances, and publications. Her practice addresses a range of socio-political questions, using poetic language to expose contemporary power structures while also exploring modes of resistance.​
Henrike Gootjes is an internationally active artist, researcher, educator and the author of the book, Regeneratie. She holds a Fine Art degree from Academie Minerva and a Master’s degree from ArtEZ University of the Arts. Her artistic research focuses on regenerative processes, systems change, and the role of art within complex social, ecological, and political contexts. Henrike has worked and taught across a range of (inter)national institutions and within contexts of peacebuilding and ecological restoration. Her practice connects artistic methodologies with education, research, and professional collaboration across disciplines.
Joana Velu is a visual artist and cultural scientist, working in contemporary art and higher art education as a project coordinator and facilitator. She currently works at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie as Project Manager of Urgent Ecologies. Raised between the Netherlands and Brazil, her artistic practice explores how we as individuals are influenced by the environments and cultural contexts we inhabit, while also being part of and contributing to it. Her work embraces immersive and collaborative experiences, cultivating awareness of the body, self, and collective through workshops, installations, performance, ceramics, video, drawing, and text.​
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer is a senior researcher at Nieuwe Instituut, founder of the ecological and cooperative organisational based model Zoöp and the director of the Zoönomic Institute. With a background in history, art, digital culture and DIY communities, he works at the intersection of ecology, culture and technology. At the New Store in the Nieuwe Instituut, he is developing the Regenerative Label which is a means of assessing regenerative performance of various products and services. Klaas is co-founder of Collective Compos(t)ing and continues to support the collective by embedding its work within the New Store’s experimental model of regenerative exchange.
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Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is professor of performance philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and Professor at the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD). She co-directs Climate Imaginaries at Sea, which speculates on possible futures in and around water through artistic research. She leads the Art Alliance in the movement Imagining Climate Justice in Minor Key and is a member of the cross-institutional working group Regenerative Art Education. Her research focuses on transformative encounters between performance, philosophy and non-human animals, including her book Interspecies Performance (2024), co-edited with Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp.
Martijn van Gessel is the initiator of the Green Autonomous Zone and a lecturer and researcher at the University of the Arts Utrecht, Research and Innovation / Music & Technology. His work focuses on manifest and action, researching and developing perspectives on the ecological crisis, and initiating educational activities in the field of art and ecology. These activities aim to make the ecological crisis personal, tangible, and local through gardening in public space as artistic research.
Martyn Smits is guided by the belief that connection grows through difference and works at the intersection of art, leadership and regenerative thinking. He embraces ambiguity, paradox and diversity as vital sources of creativity and collective resilience. His work in arts education is driven by a commitment to cultivating sustainable, regenerative practices that reconnect people, communities and ecosystems. Rather than seeking uniformity, he creates spaces where multiple perspectives meet to engage with complex societal challenges. He studied Music (Classical Organ and Music Theory), Musicology and Philosophy, holds an MBA, and currently serves as Vice Dean at Fontys Academy of the Arts.
Michaela Davidová is an artist, researcher, educator and a manager of the DISCO Lab (Design for Inter Species Collectives Laboratory) run by the Regenerative art and design group at CARADT (Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology). Michaela's research investigates the ecology of materials through mapping the environment, questioning the value of matter or seeking an attunement between humanature. Her methods have roots in experiments with bio art, alternative photography, and the light-sensitive processes, but her works are not limited to images. She supports the film lab Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam and the UK-based charity the Sustainable Darkroom, and is a board member of Text my Sister, a contemporary arts collective with base in Noord-Brabant.
Phyllis Wong is the co-founder, weaver, and project leader of Collective Compos(t)ing. Trained and practiced as an architect, she is an educator and independent design researcher. She holds an MA in Master Design from the Piet Zwart Institute. Phyllis conducts lectures and workshops for professionals based on her design research topic, Learning to (un)learn, which advocates for embodied and systemic understandings of our ecological dimensions in support of a transition toward regenerative practice. She received her first insights into regenerative design through Regenesis and is an active member of The Regenerative Practitioner community in the Benelux region.