Shelly Annette Biesel is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in environmental anthropology. She has ten years of experience working on collaborative, community-based, ethnographic research and applied projects. Her work mobilizes decolonial, multispecies, and feminist frameworks to investigate how social inequalities articulate with environmental change in semi-arid, forest, mountain, and coastal landscapes. Her historically-driven, community-oriented research advances understandings of the multiple dimensions of contemporary social and ecological crises.

Shelly recently earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, where she was based in the Humans and Environmental Change Lab. She also received a women and gender studies certificate from UGA’s Institute for Women’s Studies. She is a Fulbright Scholar, and a founding member and Digital Projects Coordinator for the Brazil Natural Resource Governance Initiative.