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CoFounder – BirdHouse
Board Director – Dignity of Man 501c3
“I have had the good fortune to work in many different crafts, from ceramics to community building. I’ve directed special effects and documentary films about music and cultural transmission, and in the process I have had a family, played music, traveled, sailed, freight-hopped and barged.
This is the life of a generalist, a jack of all trades. For better or worse I have never been able to specialize. But I find there is a role for a generalist as one with an overview and sometimes a vision. I am interested in creating the conditions where life can flourish. I am at the service of people and plants (and by extension all living things). I am driven by the idea that people can act as positive agents in bringing fertility and abundance to all people and places. Restoration is the great work of our time.
The BirdHouse is a place to hatch for those who flock. A space to hatch ideas and projects. A place to flock as do swarms of starlings, in a fashion that evokes our collective intelligence by working the strong suit of homo sapiens, cooperation and communication.”
CoFounder – BirdHouse
Board Member – Dignity of Man 501c3
Bella LeNestour is one of the original co-founders of the BirdHouse project where she aspires to cultivate biophilia and restore the connection between Nature and people’s true Nature.
Bella was born in France and made her career in the visual arts, working as art director for theater and film productions between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Attracted to the alchemical world of plants, she took an apprenticeship in medicinal plants with the Gaia School of Healing and re-discovered her connection to the Natural world. She now shares skills in plant medicine, practices soil remediation, participates in the BirdHouse Band of Singers, and collaborates in the personal, cultural, and ecological healing of people and place.
She believes the role of the BirdHouse is to cultivate the conditions to mobilize curious minds, to learn skills and step up with a renewed sense of imagination of what is possible in our relationship with each other and the living Earth… and to have fun doing it.
She is a board member for Dignity of Man, the fiscal receiver of the BirdHouse project. She acknowledges that we are on Tongva land, (the original stewards of the Los Angeles basin who still provide leadership and understanding).
Director of the Band of Singers Program
Maesa Pullman, native to Beachwood Canyon, works with music, songs, harmony, voice, and performance most everyday. This made beginning the Band of Singers with the BirdHouse in 2017 a natural fit.
The Band of Singers is a non-traditional community group-singing workshop experience singing original and traditional songs while creating site-specific, interdisciplinary performances.
Maesa strongly believes in the power of singing together and its soul-filling, spirit-lifting, and community-strengthening properties. After graduating from Hampshire College, she has focused on writing, recording, and performing her dreamy Americana originals in Los Angeles and Norway. She has been influential in creating and leading the music of several collaborative, community-performance endeavors in Montana, New York, and Norway. Maesa is also the lead singer of Norwegian-American band The Last Hurrah!! (Runegrammofon) and has experience composing for independent films.
CoFounder – BirdHouse
Board Treasurer – Dignity of Man 501c3
With a reverence for beauty, deep listening and respect for all life, Janet Sager Knott is committed to restoring the harmonious relationship between humans, land and water. Janet is a leader in envisioning and implementing programs for individual and systemic transformation–– change that pervades all parts of a system, taking into account the interrelationships and interdependencies among those parts. She serves as a founding steward of The BirdHouse with John Allen and Bella LeNestour. Janet studied Environmental Design at Parsons School of Design in New York and has a passion for regenerative design and healing practices. She has a BA from UCLA in Art History / Visual Culture and was invited by the Director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc) to develop and teach an innovative program bridging design thinking and professional practice. After earning her Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership from Woodbury University she began designing and delivering strategic planning, leadership programs, and change efforts for organizations. An active member of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, Janet divides her time between Los Angeles and Ojai as an ambassador for collective wisdom practices.
“I developed a passion for individual and community transformation in the course of a twenty-eight year career working with world-renowned architects and designers. Ojai began calling me in 2014 after facilitating a retreat for fifty architects at The Ojai Foundation, around the same time that I met John Allen and Bella LeNestour as a volunteer at the Hollywood Orchard, which they co-founded with Bill and Tamara Pullman, among others. The natural abundance of the Ojai valley, a more contemplative pace of life, and the richness of the community feels reminiscent of years spent among the spiritual and cultural community of healers, teachers, and mystics in Vermont and Sedona AZ. I am drawn to and see the BirdHouse’s approach to urban land stewardship as an important model of sustainability and resilience that I have been honored to help hone.”
Your tax deductible donation supports our mission of engaging with each other in finding creative solutions through permaculture, systems thinking, medicinal plants, art, singing, science and storytelling. We aspire to a new story of interdependence, to restore shared wisdom, and to have fun doing it.
