Welcome to Gigi Berardi's home page!

Gigi Berardi received her BA in biology with high honors from John Muir College, University of California San Diego and her MS and PhD in Resources, Policy, and Planning from Cornell University. She holds a MA in dance (now, World Arts and Cultures) from UCLA. She taught at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, from 1994-1995, and is now professor and projecte director (after seven years as chair of the Department of Environmental Studies) at Huxley College, Western Washington University, where she focuses on community vulnerabilities and cultural ecology. Her research and writing includes study and review of Food and Farm Systems, Performing Arts, and Native American Studies and Tribal Education.

Since coming to Western, she has continued her research and writing in both environmental studies and the arts but also has extended her career-long interests to increasingly blend the two fields.  In her research into historical consolidation of communities that exist beyond economic or environmental carrying capacities in remote sub-arctic areas, she integrates natural resources and cultural geography with traditional music and dance.  In addition to having served as a core faculty member in the Tribal Environmental and Natural Resources Management (TENRM) program, she completed work on a special issue on Alaska natural resources and Native land claims for Journal of Land, Resources, & Environmental Law. Her work on Native dance and arts as subsistence resources has appeared in publications such as Dance Magazine and The Anchorage Daily News.

For the past three years, Gigi Berardi served as interim director of the Institute for Global and Community Resilience (titled, the Resilience Institute) at Huxley College and currently serves as Resilient Farms Project director, working  closely with staff and community members in identifying vulnerabilities in food systems and ways forward in increasing resilience and thus, prosperity. The work is funded with a USDA/NIFA grant for extreme event-based scenario planning.