Board of Directors

ASWM Board, adapting to the times
ASWM Board, adapting to the times

Sarah Chandler aka Kohenet Shamirah: Sarah is the program director of Romemu Yeshiva, a contemplative study program in New York City and a garden educator with Grow Torah. A trainer with Ta’amod, she supports Jewish non-profits in harassment prevention. A Kohenet (Hebrew Priestess), she studies shamanic healing at The Wisdom School of S.O.P.H.I.A and Kabbalistic dream work at The School of Images.


Joan M. Cichon is a retired history professor and reference librarian, has a PhD in Women’s Spirituality from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation, Matriarchy in Minoan Crete: A Perspective from Archaeomythology and Modern Matriarchal Studies, reflects her on-going interest in Bronze Age Crete, archaeomythology, and Modern Matriarchal Studies. 


Kathryn Henderson, Associate Professor, Emerita, Texas A&M University: Sociology and Women’s Studies; Clergy, Re-Formed Congregation of the Goddess International.  Publications explore visual knowledge from design engineering to disaster survivors’ mental maps; include ”The Deer Mother: Earth’s Nurturing Epicenter of Life and Death” in Goddesses in World Culture, 2011, editor, Patricia Monaghan. After the 2018 California Wildfires Henderson initiated Art from the Ashes programming and Art Exhibit to heal individuals, community and land through art.


Mary Jo Neitz is Professor Emerita at the University of Missouri in Columbia.  She is a founding member of the MU Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and holds a Ph.D in sociology.  She taught feminist theories and methodologies to graduate and undergraduate students.  She studies religious practices and experiences in a variety of settings, primarily in the US.  She serves as the United States representative on the Governing Council of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.  She lives with two young cats in beautiful Boone County, just a few miles from the Missouri River, and she celebrates native plants inside and outside of her gardens. 


Sid Reger EdD, received her doctorate in adult education from Indiana University.  She is an artist, educator, and independent scholar whose passions are prehistoric arts, matrifocal cultures, mythology and animal mysteries. Now semi-retired, she still teaches widely, relating these topics to women’s spiritual journeys. She is co-founder, with the late Patricia Monaghan, of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, and currently serves as president. She lives in western PA with two sentient felines.


Suzanne Roupas, who has been a longtime volunteer and has served as our Registrar several times, joined the board in 2020. She lives in beautiful Central New York, a place of green beauty, water and extreme winters. She says, “I’m a beloved daughter of the Goddess, a Priestess and ritualist. After a wonderful career as a Pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist, I am now free to indulge my love of travel, creativity and activism. I teach, produce women-centered spiritual events and am usually found planning my next trip.


In Memoriam

Patricia Monaghan was associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She was the author of four books of poetry and more than a dozen nonfiction books including The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Legend and The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines. She was a co-founding member of ASWM (with Sid Reger) and served as Vice-President. She died in 2012 and is greatly missed.