Andrew Faust
Founder - Director
One of the premier Permaculture teachers and designers in North America with over two decades of experience in the field. His passionate and mind expanding talks and curriculum have motivated teachers, students since his decade long career as a H.S. teacher at Upattina's, a open community free school in Glenmoore, PA. View Faust's TED X lecture
Andrew created his own Permaculture Ph'd project, in 1999, a fully off grid, Straw Bale educational center in Pocahontas County W.V. He moved to Brooklyn in 2007 and has been applying his knowledge to the urban landscape.Faust has been inspiring film makers with the message of Permaculture culminating in the film: Inhabit, and a life changing Permaculture Design Certification course, with thousands of graduates. Faust received a dual diploma in Design and Education from Permaculture Institute of North America in 2016. Andrew and Adriana Magaña with their daughter Juniper run the Center for Bioregional Living in Ellenville, NY., a hands-on educational campus for students and clients.
Andrew Faust, a visionary permaculture and bioregional educator taps into the rich synergy between permaculture and biodynamic agriculture which he has been studying with a focus on orchards since he completed his permaculture design training in 1996. Some of our design clients include: Click to View
Andrew is a certified Alternative School Teacher, focusing on Bioregional Education; he instructed at Upattina's Open Community High School from 1992-2001. Faust holds a B.A. in comparative religions from Guilford College.
Adriana Magaña
Co Founder - Instructor
Adriana Magaña is an interdisciplinary artist and designer living with her family in Ellenville, NY.
Adriana is inspired by her commitment to co-create a sustainable world with integrity and ethical values; a world based in nature and justice. Adriana grew up in San Diego, CA exploring the ocean and vast outdoors in the relatively unsupervised 70’s and 80’s. This wild and exploratory childhood planted the seeds of her artistic vision which have grown into more than three decades of self-taught expression through a variety of mediums, spaces, and places.
Adriana finds purpose and pleasure in using her work as a vehicle to break down societal barriers and expectations. She enjoys collaborating with diverse communities across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Her artistic work encompasses the mediums of musical composition, performance, map making, social commentary and critique, painting, envisioning possible futures, and sculpture. Her social practice involves regional design and retrofit, permaculture design, creating temporary autonomous zones, growing food, organizing community gardens, refrigerators, and mutual aid networks, and working to make her community more resilient and civically engaged.
In the 1990’s, Adriana toured extensively as a drummer throughout Europe and the United States with the band Crash Worship. She won a grant through the Jerome Foundation for experimental composition in 2001, and also won awards for her underground performance venue, Happy Birthday Hideout, in Brooklyn, NY, which she curated with roommates. In 1997 long-time collaborator Leslie Samuels (RIP) insisted she start a marching band to play in the Mermaid Day Parade and Hungry March Band was born. Named from inspiration found from her tours in Europe, Adriana led the band until 1999 winning awards and underground acclaim.
Following this period of dedication to musical expression, Adriana relocated to Ellenville, NY in 2008 from Brooklyn, NY to pursue permaculture design and raise her daughter in that lifestyle. Understanding the need to create a positive vision for the Earth, Adriana immersed herself in learning and practicing holistic solutions to address our present problems through the tools of permaculture design. She catches and stores rainwater, makes bio-gas from the waste that leaves her home, and knows how to read the landscape.
Along with life-partner Andrew Faust, Adriana co-directs the Center for Bioregional Living and has facilitated the permaculture education of thousands of participants in the U.S. and around the world. Committed to creating positive change, Adriana ran for Ulster County Legislature in 2019 and now volunteers her time working to expand civic engagement through voter outreach. She is a congregant of the Church of the Little Green Man where you will find her leading the church in various performance rituals and playing drums in the Band of All Faiths.
Adriana has never stopped creating and performing music, and is working on combining this lifelong passion with her social work. Through her talents, courage, and optimism, she persists in her efforts to move us closer to liberation and a healthy and just world.
What We Do
Create regional Infrastructures that are diverse and well adapted to the local ecological,social and geological realities. A bioregion is an area that shares similar soils, climate, and plant and animal communities, they can include several watersheds. As a planning tool it dates to the 1920's when they were devised as physiographic provinces combining the sciences of physical geology and geography. Today they are being used as a regulatory base map by the EPA and the DEP and The Nature Conservancy. We are expanding the concept to create regionally appropriate models for economic development using Permaculture design.
Bioregional economies address:
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Social justice
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Responsible economy
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Land use equity
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Sustainable agriculture
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Restoration ecology
It is about the development of agricultural practices in a context with a deeper look at the landscape of the region, appropriate to the geography and heritage of the place. It is about accountable stewardship of urban cityscapes to dramatically reduce the enormous waste generated by those spaces and to create positive relationships between cities and outlying rural communities. Andrew Faust asks, “How do we retrofit this infrastructure to be more ecologically sound and socially responsible?” He seeks the answer to this question in permaculture, articulating the interconnectedness of ecology and economy and describing tangible, simple, and yet somehow revolutionary urban and rural designs.
Center for Bioregional Living Guest Presenters and Lecturers
Lisa DePiano is a certified permaculture designer, teacher and practitioner with over 15 years of experience. She has taught hundreds of students in various settings from the streets of Occupy Wall Street to the media lab at MIT to delivering the keynote at the 2012 Northeast Permaculture Convergence. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts and co-founder and lead instructor of Permaculture FEAST. She runs the Mobile Design Lab which specializes in participatory permaculture design and installation.
Mark Krawczyk is a permaculture and ecological design educator, designer and consultant; traditional woodworker; natural builder; and aspiring forester in Vermont's Champlain Valley. After spending nearly four years traveling the US and beyond, studying with experts in the fields of perennial food production, ecological building, coppice forestry and green woodworking, he settled back in northern Vermont where he just recently began to develop his vision for a 52 acre homestead he purchased in 2012. He owns and operates Keyline Vermont and RivenWoodCrafts, is a member of Seven Generations Natural Builders and co-founded the community group Burlington Permaculture. He's passionate about manifesting positive change in the world and suffers from an insatiable desire to never stop learning.
Paula Hewitt Amram is the founder of Open Road Park in the Lower East Side. She will be talking to us about the transformation of a former bus depot / brownfield into the thriving community garden Open Road park is today.
Lars Chellberg of CENYC and Water Resources Group Water Resources Group builds and maintains low cost Rain Water Harvesting systems across the five boroughs and leads educational workshops on sustainable water practices. He will be leading a tour of one of the systems he designed for a community garden in the Lower East Side.
Bill Young of Young Environmental LLC is a recognized leader in the environmental field with more than 25 years of experience as a project manager, designer, and wetland specialist. His expertise includes habitat restoration on disturbed lands, wetlands monitoring and construction, botanical inventory, wildlife assessment, streambank restoration; and erosion and sediment control.
David Harper founded Land In Common to assist community organizations, landowners, and local governments in establishing a secure land base for local production of food fuel, and fiber. Current projects include a farmland preservation plan in Boone, North Carolina, a tropical food forest network in South Florida, a report on community land trusts for the United Nations, and Cornucopia, an urban agriculture land trust in Durham, North Carolina. Land In Common builds on David’s 15-year career as a conservation professional working with land trusts and local governments to raise more than $3 million dollars in grant funds and preserve over 1,500 acres of farm and forest land. He designed and teaches a master level course in land stewardship at the University of Pennsylvania. The Land In Common vision: free the land/free the people.