odyssey team members

Ming Holden is a writer, artist, and international development worker.
Her first book, a nonfiction novella about a group she founded in Nairobi for refugee women called The Survival Girls, will come out in November 2013 through Wolfram Productions. Her writing about the experience creating the group has won both an AWP Intro Award for Nonfiction and USAID's "Frontiers in Development" worldwide essay competition. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentions The Survival Girls in the intro to the publication
 
This year Ming won Chattahoochee Review's annual nonfiction prize and Glimmer Train's Family Matters story contest. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Alchemy, Arts & Letters, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Best American Poetry Blog, Passages North, Cerise Press, InAsia, Ink Node, InTheFray, Molotov Cocktail, Peaches and Bats, The Poker, Poets & Artists, the Santa Barbara Independent, and others. While an undergraduate at Brown University (’07) she co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Brown Literary Review
 
Ming served the Mongolian Writers Union as its first-ever International Relations Adviser during her year as a Henry Luce Scholar in Mongolia and worked towards the formation of a Mongolia PEN Center. She has since returned to Mongolia to work for The Asia Foundation on a literary translation and advocated for an exiled Chinese writer in Turkey at the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress 2010, where she was the youngest presenter. Ming has done international nonprofit work in Russia (at the Silver Taiga Sustainable Forestry Foundation); Ecuador (at the CEMOPLAF family planning center); Bolivia (at the Rio Beni Health Project); Mongolia (at The Asia Foundation); and also in New York (at Archipelago Books) and California (at People Helping People)

From her native Germany, Clarissa Koenig was inspired to come to Santa Barbara in pursuit of the beauty of nature and incredible light that would inform her photographic work. She has an extensive background in producing for TV, Film and Photography. When she moved to Hawaii in 2004 she got so inspired by all the beauty that surrounded her that she finally picked up a camera and became a photographer in her own right. To Clarissa, photography is about being in the moment and going beyond what the eye can see. It is about capturing the true essence and beauty that shines through every being - the very essence of the person in this moment.  She photographs Love and Life. She is also a lover of film photography, believing that there is nothing that compares to its luminous quality.  Film has so much soul and is often the perfect medium for her to capture the magic of a moment, the true beauty and essence of the subjects or objects that she photographs. ?She loves collaboration with other creative individuals and also supports charitable causes with her photography. Being an animal lover, she has donated her services to animal shelters to produce photographs that will attract potential adopters, the Waldorf School Fundraiser, the Angel Foster Luncheon, the Women Helping Women network and other fundraisers. She believes everyone can make a difference by finding out how they can serve the purpose of the greater good. Her gift is photography and being able to participate in The Odyssey Project has been and continues to be an incredible experience for her.

Haddy Kreie is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Theater and Dance and is also working toward a Black Studies emphasis. Her current research seeks to reconceptualize the understanding of trauma theory in terms outside of dominant Western psychoanalytic paradigms, particularly in terms of the contemporary postcolonial experience in Benin in West Africa. She earned an M.A. in Theatre Studies in 2012 at Florida State University with a study on how theatre of Madagascar negotiates Malagasy national identity through the representation of traumatic colonial memories. Haddy's tertiary research interests also include the political implications of various aesthetic forms of African theatre, especially regarding representations of power and violence on stage, and devised and documentary theatre and the use of theatre for deploying ethical paradigms. Before pursuing a Master’s degree, Haddy served two-and-a-half years in the Peace Corps in Madagascar as a rural health development agent. Her major projects in Madagascar included developing television programming for women’s healthcare, directing a nationally broadcast youth talk show, and implementing preventative healthcare measures in a rural village, which have played a significant role in developing her scholarship and methodology. Haddy also works as a director and dramaturge, specifically interested in new plays and devised work. Last year she directed the first ensemble production of Donald M. Molosi's award winning play Blue, Black, and White, about the Seretse Khama, the founding father of Botswana and advocate for a multicultural African state. Haddy is the recipient of several prestigious awards for her research on including International Federation of Theatre Research's 2013 New Scholar's Prize,  UCSB’s 2014 Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant, American Society of Theatre Research’s 2014 Helen Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship, and the 2014 Mendell Graduate Fellowship in Cultural Literacy from the Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life. 

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