Kaitlyn Rathwell is an environmental change scholar and practicing performance artist. Her research capacity has grown from pursuing an Honors of Arts degree at McGill University, Canada, a Masters of Science at The Stockholm Resilience Center, Sweden, and by working as a researcher at The Hafen City University in Hamburg and The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Kitchener, Canada. Currently, she is a PhD candidate with the Environmental Change Governance Group (ECGG) lead by Prof. Derek Armitage at The University of Waterloo, Canada.
Kaitlyn’s artistic self has been nurtured through many years of Royal Conservatory classical piano and theory, theatre and dance training. She has performed and competed with music, theatre and tap dance in Canada and Europe. Currently she composes and performs under the stage alias of “K. La Luna”.
Reconciling her intellectual and artistic selves, Kaitlyn is now engaging in what she calls ‘Art + Science Alchemy’. Her doctoral research is pushing the boundaries of Arctic transdisciplinary environmental research to include the arts. She is research fellow with Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation Resilience where she studies art and science collaborations for sustainable futures and visual design in an Inuit context. Kaitlyn is passionate about advancing the artistic response to environmental change and wants to contribute to bringing aesthetics into how society navigates complex social-environmental changes.