Katharine Owens, Ph.D. is a National Geographic Explorer and Fulbright Nehru fellow. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who merges science, policy, and the arts on the topic of plastic pollution. She has worked on plastic pollution projects in places as varied as Connecticut, USA, Kerala, India, and Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. Katharine Owens is also a Professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and International Studies at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
In 2021 she began Entangled and Ingested, a multi-year project to construct life-sized portraits of animals harmed by plastic pollution by hand-sewing film plastic on canvas. The largest pieces are co-created in public sewing workshops.
In her work, she seeks to continually push the boundaries between art and science, using the arts to explore the world’s most pressing environmental problems. Katharine hopes working with communities to examine plastic pollution and to advocate for better policy can lead to comprehensive change.