Nina Isabella Moeller

Nina has experience as a researcher, facilitator, 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 in SDU FoodLab at University of Southern Denmark; and previously held research fellowships at the universities of Oxford (2016-2017) and Manchester (2017-2019); and was Associate Professor of Political Ecology and People’s Knowledge in the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University from (2019-2024).

Nina has worked with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon and Andes since 2005 on issues including 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 well as means of measuring ‘agroecologicalness’, as part of the overarching work on enabling agroecology transformations with the AgroecologyNow! research collective.

At the FAO, she 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 recently began designing and implementing a forest garden with her family.

She speaks German, English, French, Spanish and a bit of Danish; uses GNU/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