Category: Directors

Kitty Quitmeyer is a librarian turned professional yarn-crafter. Her interests lie in sustainability, fiber arts, books, and endangered animals.  She is the co-director of Dinalab, and she develops and maintains lab infrastructure while running workshops, events, and logistics. She also leads the upcycling initiative at Dinalab. Her work ensures that the majority of our prototyping and artistic materials are made from garbage we remove from the environs.

Kitty creates yarn-crafted artwork to bring attention to scientific practices and discoveries. She also spends her time volunteering with an endangered animal rescue center. You can see more of her works at https://www.instagram.com/well.read.panda and www.wellreadpanda.com

Dr. Andrew Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. His transdisciplinary work spans scientific and design processes, from material exploration and natural experimentation to artistic outreach. Quitmeyer has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian; taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore; and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Andy spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations and communities, and he most recently founded the field-station maker-space, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. We build scientific tools for field biologists, enrichment toys for animal rehabilitation, and community through open workshops and events. Our research’s largest event, the international Digital Naturalism Conference, brings together hundreds of participants from all fields to collaborate on finding new ways of interacting with nature.