From an early age, Elizabeth M. Burton-Crow, PhD (aka "Dr. Crow") has felt most at home while connecting across species.  She grew up exploring the forests of the Sierra Nevada foothills alongside her feathered and four-legged kin.  Spending much of her childhood outdoors, she became attuned with the rhythms of her surroundings, each season’s influence on full display at a nearby pond.  Sliding down its muddy banks, each spring eagerly awaited the return of wild geese and fluffy goslings.  Summer brought dragonflies and herons harpooning fish.  In the fall, the bullfrogs went quiet, and the winter brought a frozen stillness that became shorter as she grew taller. 

 

Once grown enough to fledge the nest, Liz flew off to study Psychology and Environmental Studies, attempting to articulate the profound connection between Nature and Psyche that she’d felt all her life.  Many of her university professors espoused objectivity and experimental rigor at the expense of subjective inquiry; it was a bifurcation between observer and observed that felt antithetical to what Liz had been taught by Nature through relationship and the mutual transformation therein.  Her philosophical approach to inquiry eventually led her to the fields of Depth Psychology and Ecopsychology, and in 2018 she earned a PhD, her doctoral dissertation focusing upon the relationship between Poultry, Parrots, and People in the context of captivity. 

 

Today, Liz’s work strives to expand the frontiers of Ecopsychology by illuminating the often-unconscious forces underlying cross-species relationships through the integration of ethics, art, and science.  The Nature Imaginarium is the embodiment of such work, celebrating Nature and the boundless creativity it inspires.  Now firmly rooted in the Pacific Northwest, her extended family includes goats, donkeys, dogs, llamas, chickens, rabbits, and parrots.