Nina Moeller

Nina has experience as a researcher, facilitator, conflict mediator, project manager and media maker in social and environmental movements, academia, indigenous organisations, civil society organisations, private companies and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). With a mixed academic background in philosophy, anthropology and geography, she is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), Coventry University in England, and previously held research fellowships at the universities of Oxford (2016-2017) and Manchester (2017-2019).

Nina has worked with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon and Andes since 2005 on issues you such as market expansion and socio-ecological transitions and conflicts, especially in the context of ancestral knowledge systems, plant medicine and forest foods. There she learned that plants speak and institutions don’t listen.

More recently, she has analysed (and developed methodologies to analyse) finance for agroecology, as part of the overarching work on enabling agroecology transformations with the AgroecologyNow! research collective.

Nina teaches on CAWR’s MSc programme in Agroecology, Water and Food Sovereignty, and sits on the Advisory Board of the Northern Real Farming Conference, BananaLink, the Real Food Campaign, and the Journal for Political Ecology. She accompanies the building of the Global Coalition of Open Source Seed Commons.

At the FAO, Nina also continues to work on funding and finance aspects of the Plant Treaty and its Multilateral System of Access and Benefit-sharing.

With the Tortuga Films collective, Nina produced, directed and edited the documentaries ‘genova citta aperta’, which covers the events surrounding the 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa; and ‘dogs run free’, which takes a critical view on the EU’s migration policies and practices and celebrates the no border movement.

A passionate herbalist and wildcrafter, Nina enjoys experimenting with foraged foods and fermentation – and lives in the hope that her dream of a forest garden will soon come true.

She speaks German, English, French, Spanish and a bit of Danish; uses Linux and prefers Free and Open Source software solutions.

Expertise: Different knowledge systems & transdisciplinarity; Seeds & biogenetic resource politics; food system transitions and transformations
Skills: Research & writing; policy analysis; project design & implementation; participatory processes; conflict resolution; participatory video

Contact: nina@cultivatecollective.org