New Program Director and Secretary, Wennifer Lin Haver, PhD

 

Wennifer Lin Haver, PhD

Wennifer received her masters and doctoral degrees from the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department at UCLA. She specializes in women's birthing/healing traditions as expressed through indigenous and emergent ritual art and earth-based ontology. 

Her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Birth Art and the Art of Birthing: Creation and Procreation on the 'Aina of Tutu Pele" (2008), is an interdisciplinary, diachronic, and multivocal study that draws from folklore, medical anthropology, cultural studies, eco-feminism, archaeomythology, spiritual midwifery, and female shamanism. Wennifer has published on folk and alternative medicine and conducted fieldwork in Hawai'i and Los Angeles. In 1999-2002, she was part of a National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine study on Latino health systems with her mentor, renowned medical folklorist, Dr. Michael Owen Jones. 

Within the past decade, she has actively shared her research in a number of conferences, including presentations at the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology and the Matriarchal Studies Conference (2010, 2014). She has also lectured at the East-West Center in Honolulu on "Community Building through Food and Folklore: The Importance of Reclaiming our Indigenous Matriarchal Origins" (2012).

Wennifer also goes by the Indigenous name of Sayun Lesa, as she has roots with the Atayal peoples.