Jen de los Reyes is an artist, farmer, educator, and writer whose practice grew out of the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene — and never lost its conviction that organizing is a creative act. That ethos now runs through her work at the intersection of art, ecology, and land, where she brings permaculture thinking to bear on how we make, teach, and inhabit the world.
Her practice has evolved over two decades from the organizing and social practice work that defined her early career — co-founding the Art and Social Practice MFA at Portland State University, directing Open Engagement (an international conference on socially engaged art, 2007–2019), and building values-aligned institutions that centered artists — toward a sustained inquiry into land, regeneration, and ecological belonging.
That shift is embodied in two long-term projects. LAND —co-founded with Oscar Rene Cornejo, with whom she received a 2025 Creative Capital Award — is a place-based but not place-bound platform for artists, educators, and communities working at the intersection of art and ecology. It is not defined by a single site; it is a philosophy and practice that can take root wherever there is land, community, and the will to tend both. Garbage Hill Farm, her urban farm on a post-industrial corridor in Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood, is a proposition that a residential lot can be a site of abundance, experimentation, and reciprocity. She is also the editor of And Still the Birds Sing: Finding Hope through Art in a Climate-Changed World, a forthcoming book with the National Audubon Society in which over 300 contemporary artists interpret birds threatened by climate change.
Jen is an Associate Professor of Art and Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where she teaches LAND: Art, Ecology, and Environmental Activism. She divides her time between Chicago, IL, and Ithaca, NY.
She is the author of Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Public Engagement But Were Afraid to Ask, and I'm Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning. She is a committed land steward, a steadfast believer in the power of art and artists, and a friend to all birds.
Photo credit: Chelsea Alexandra