Adrian Ivakhiv [pronunciation] holds the J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont (UVM). At UVM (2003-2024) he was a University Scholar, Public Humanities Fellow, and Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural Resources. He co-founded and led the EcoCultureLab, which organized collaborative engagements between ecologically oriented artists, scientists, humanists, and the broader community. He is also a Fulbright Scholar (Ukraine/Germany) and Research Fellow of Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany (2022-23), and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Prof. Ivakhiv is a cultural theorist and ecophilosopher whose research and teaching are focused at the intersections of ecology, culture, identity, religion, media, philosophy, and the creative arts. His books include Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press, 2001), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum Books, 2018), and the co-edited Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies. With its historical breadth and theoretical innovation, Ecologies of the Moving Image has been called “capacious and authoritative,” “groundbreaking,” a “landmark contribution” to the growing field of ecological cultural studies, and the first book of “eco-film-philosophy.” Expanding and deepening the eco-philosophy of the earlier book, Shadowing the Anthropocene presents a process-relational “philosophy of life,” a philosophy that sees images as part of the battleground in which humans contest the meanings of an increasingly turbulent world. His forthcoming books include The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in a More-than-Human World (Stanford University Press, 2025) and the anthology Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025).

Prof. Ivakhiv has served as president of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, an executive editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Thoemmes Continuum Press, 2005), founding co-editor of the international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal Media+Environment, and on the editorial boards of several journals including Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, Green Letters, The Journal of Ecocriticism, Environmental Communication, and two book series in the environmental humanities. His articles have been published across numerous disciplines including film and media studies, cultural and literary studies, religious and pilgrimage studies, human geography, and Ukrainian studies. He has been interviewed by popular radio personality Krista Tippett, profiled in a book of “post-Continental” philosophers, and invited to speak in some twenty countries on four continents.

Adrian’s interdisciplinary background includes work in the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, his research on culture and environment has taken him to late- and post-Soviet Ukraine (including a year in 1989-90 as Canada-USSR Scholar studying the cultural impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear accident), the Carpathian mountains of east central Europe, Cape Breton Island and Haida Gwaii off either coast of Canada, and other sites of cultural-ecological contestation in the U.S. Southwest, southwest England, central/eastern Europe, and elsewhere. In a previous life as a choral conductor, experimental composer, pianist, and ethno-psych-avant-garage-folk-thrash musician, he performed at monasteries in Egypt, concert stages in Ukraine, and Canada’s Parliament building in Ottawa (honestly, once).

When he isn’t teaching, researching, writing, or attending committee meetings (aargh), he makes music, hikes in the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Pacific coastal mountains of Canada and the U.S., and reads E-Flux, Спільне/ Commons, The Journal of Wild Culture, and The Tyee. Living in Burlington (Balitán, Odzíhozsék) from 2003 to 2022, from his west-facing window he watched for Champ and believes he caught a glimpse (instead) of Odzihozo. He now lives in the delta of the Fraser/Sto:lo river by the coast of the Salish Sea.