Conferences & Symposia – Page 4

January 14, 2026March 2, 2026

Leah Dorion’s Artwork Graces our 2026 Symposium

Passing Water Forward, by Leah Dorion (acrylic, 2013)

Our thanks to Leah Marie Dorion for sharing her artwork with us for our 2026 Symposium, “Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge.”

The program for this event reframes knowledge transmission and curation and promotes new connections and relationships among people, animals, and the green world. Leah’s painting, “Passing Water Forward” beautifully conveys the intention and spirit of our program, as sacred knowledge is passed from one generation to another..

Leah Marie Dorion is a Metis writer and artist currently living near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her artwork celebrates the strength and resilience of Indigenous women and families, and echoes the beauty found in traditional beadwork. Leah is also a published children’s book author and illustrator. Leah has a passion for early year’s education and is currently working with the Metis Nation of British Columbia (MNBC) to develop Metis cultural early years resources for children and families. She has also participated as a mentor and lead artist for the Mann Art Gallery Indigenous Residency Project. She is a proud member of CARFAC which is the national voice of Canada’s professional visual artists. Visit www.leahdorion.ca for more information about her artistic practice.

About this painting, Leah says “This artwork features Indigenous women gathering water from the river. The gathered water is carried within sacred vessels to represent the passing forward of knowledge about the land and water through the generations. There is a baby in a cradleboard on the mother’s back and a young girl helping to draw up the river water into her vessel to emphasize that water is necessary for life to blossom, grow, and flourish in this world.

“Holding a vessel of water in our arms, close to our heart, is representative of sharing your wisdom and knowledge to guide future generations. The Canadian Geese flying in the sky are a symbol about how important it is to find direction in life and work together as a community for the highest good of all.”

In this beautiful video, Leah discusses her artistic vision.

April 22, 2025March 22, 2025

2025 Conference Panel: Sacred Places, Living Lands and Memory

Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

The Externsteine, in the Teutoburg Forest

Sacred Places, Living Lands and Memory

with Dilsa Deniz, Sarah Chandler, Constance Tippett and Dawn Work-Makinne

Shamir (Diamond Toothed) Worm – Pacifist Slave or Anti-Prophetic Savior: Exploring Ancient and Modern Jewish Myths of Soil and Stone, Sarah Chandler
Herda Dewresh – The Sacred Earth in Kurdish Alevi Tradition, Dilsa Deniz
Moons at Serpent Mound, Constance Tippett
Animism, Indigeneity and Memory, Dawn Work-Makinne

Dilşa Deniz, a Kurdish anthropologist with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and an MA in Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on gender, culture, mythology, eco-spirituality, and environmental challenges in Kurdish Alevi communities, addressing racism and internal colonization. In her book Shamaran: The Neolithic Eternal Mother, is one of the oldest Mother Earth Goddesses she introduces.

Kohenet Shamirah Bechirah aka Sarah Chandler is a Brooklyn-based Jewish educator, artist, activist, healer, and poet. She teaches, writes, and consults on issues related to Kabbalistic dreamwork, earth-based spiritual practices, mindfulness, and farming. She has been teaching Jewish eco-ritual weaving for over 20 years. An advanced student of Kabbalistic dream work at The School of Images, she also holds a M.A. in Jewish Education and a M.A. in Hebrew Bible from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a certificate in Non-Profit Management and Jewish Communal Leadership from Columbia University. As the CEO of Shamir Collective, she coaches high-profile and emergent artists, musicians, and authors to weave portals for the next stage of creativity. She has served on the ASWM board since 2020, both as outreach manager and acting treasurer, as well as a core volunteer since 2019.

Constance Tippett is best known for her “Goddesstimeline that shows 40,00- years of imagery of women and Goddess throughout history. She also makes museum quality clay replications of Goddess statues. She is now working on a project to try and decode the meaning of Serpent Mound, which is an astronomical monument made by the indigenous People of the Americans.

Dawn Work-MaKinne, Ph.D., is an independent scholar interested in animism, the sacred feminine and Germanic Europe. Her work has appeared in Goddesses in World Culture and in ASWM conference proceedings, and she completed the final content-editing of Patricia Monaghan’s last Book of Goddesses and Heroines. She lives, studies and teaches in a forest grove in Des Moines, Iowa.

Read all about the ASWM Conference and register here.

April 2, 2025May 9, 2025

2025 Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts: Lauren Raine

Awarded on Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson Arizona

2025 Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts Awarded to Lauren Raine

This award given in recognition of her decades of creative endeavor as a temple mask-maker, creatrix of art installations, sculptress, ritual theatre performer, painter, author, visionary, and mythographer.

The award letter for Lauren reads in part:

The Masks of the Goddess Project, perhaps your best-known work, consists of stunning masks crafted in the tradition of Balinese temple-masks. These masks were created to reclaim the stories of female deities from across the world’s cultures, and to empower women to explore each archetype within themselves With the Masks of the Goddess you collaborated with dancers, ritualists, playwrights, storytellers, priestesses, and activists to bring the Goddesses into the world through the words of the women who wore their masks and wrote their stories. Since their creation in 1998, the Masks of the Goddess have traveled throughout the US and abroad, touching and transforming the lives of hundreds of women.

We honor you also for the shrines and icons you have created. Your ongoing series entitled: Earth Shrine, is a product of your lifelong conversation with the numinous intelligence in nature.

Out of that conversation you have also created NUMINA: Masks for the Elemental Powers which is your elucidation of the magical sense of communion with place. As you said, “In the past “Nature” was not a “backdrop” or a “resource” – the World was a conversation.”

In Our Lady of the Shards, you celebrate the forgotten women of history: midwives, wise women, weavers, spinners, Goddesses and priestesses. In Shrine for the Lost: the Sixth Extinction (2022), you created a book, and art installation for the 2023 World Parliament of Religions, emphasizing the magnitude of the loss our biosphere has suffered.

With your four sculptures The Guardians, which symbolize and invoke the Guardians of the Four Directions, as well as the Four Elements, you cast a circle of protection to safeguard us from further ecological loss. In Spider Woman’s Hands you weave, reveal, and remember a vision of a unitive, co-creative world through sculpture, weaving, and performance.

Writing about mythology you have observed: “We’re dancing the future into the world by the stories we tell: like the web of the Native American creatrix Spider Woman, the threads of myth are spun far behind us, and weave their way far into the futures of those not yet born.

“May we dance empathy instead of despair, may we tell the stories that make life sacred and loving, profound and reverent.”

April 1, 2025March 23, 2025

2025 Saga Award for Contributions to Women’s History and Culture: Cristina Biaggi

Awarded on Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson Arizona

2025 Saga Award for Contributions to Women’s History and Culture: Cristina Biaggi PhD

ASWM’s Saga Award is given to individuals whose work cuts across disciplines, traditioins, and generations to create work that centers women’s history and promotes the advancement of an all-inclusive, life-affirming feminist culture. This year’s award recognizes Cristina Biaggi, PhD, for her contributions to the world as an artist, scholar, author, teacher, and feminist activist.

The award letter to Cristina reads in part:

The titles of your four major books: Habitations of the Great Goddess, In the Footsteps of the Goddess, The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, and Activism Into Art Into Activism Into Art give some idea of the vast scope of your scholarship, interests, talents, and vision.

As an author and scholar, you are a respected and recognized authority on Goddess mythology, prehistory, and the origins and impact of patriarchy. Your knowledge of these subjects is rooted in your studies of the classics, art, art history, archaeology, literature, and languages acquired at Vassar, the University of Utah, Harvard, and NYU. For over five decades, you have been conducting ongoing, in-depth research that has broadened and deepened your passion and abiding interest in the Goddess and antiquity.

For many of us, our first introduction to the Goddess and to the great Goddess monuments of ancient Malta and the islands of Scotland, came through your 1994 work Habitations of the Great Goddess. Your 2000 book In the Footsteps of the Goddess, which is a collection of personal stories inspired by the Female Divine, is a first in the field of spirituality. In The Rule of Mars (2006), you bring together an outstanding group of scholars to tackle the questions of when and where the change from a matriarchal to a patriarchal societal structure occurred and what the results of that change were. This pivotal collection not only heightened our understanding of pre-patriarchal societies, but left us with hope and thoughtful suggestions for real change.

In addition to publishing these works, you have spoken about the Goddess, prehistory and the origins of patriarchy throughout the world, bringing these neglected topics to such prestigious venues as the Smithsonian Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the World Archaeology Conference, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Times.

Those of us who know you as a scholar of the Goddess and antiquity can sometimes forget that you are an internationally renowned artist as well. All of your art is entwined with activism in celebration of the Great Goddess. In addition to your figurative sculpture in bronze and wood, you have created political and abstract collages and paintings, constructed large outdoor sculptures from materials found in the natural world. You have created the Goddess Mound, which will be both a sacred place in itself, and a long overdue link to the sacred earthworks that were on this continent long before Europeans arrived.

You have also provided a strong role model as a dedicated athlete: a mountain climber–hiking to some of the most awe-inspiring peaks in the world, including Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta, Mount Rainier, and the active Gorely volcano in Siberia; a world-class swimmer, crossing the Bosphorus, and a 5th degree Blackbelt in Taekwondo sharing that skill as a teacher of Taekwondo with women and girls.

We are happy to honor you as a foremother of the Women’s Spirituality movement, a pre-eminent artist, author, scholar, and tireless feminist activist. You have been and continue to be an inspiration to ASWM members and to women throughout the world.

Past winners of the Saga Award include Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughan, Dr. Peggy Sanday, Z Budapest, Arisika Razak, Donna Read, and Dr. Mara Keller.

April 1, 2025March 23, 2025

2025 Sarasvati Special Recognition: Tona Inna, the mysterious light of the sea in the Caribbean

Saturday, March 29, 2025, Westward Look Inn, Tucson AZ

Sarasvati Special Recognition for Best Visionary Book:CIDICER

**for Tona Inna, the mysterious light of the sea in the Caribbean, by Maria Suarez**

The

The Sarasvati Awards Committee has chosen to issue a Special Recognition for a Visionary Book to CIDICER for Tona Inna, the mysterious light of the sea in the Caribbean, by Maria Suarez Toro. This book highlights African and Caribbean myths, and a knowledge of the powers of the sea, in order to inspire new generations to understand Costa Rica’s history and the future of its youth.

The letter of recognition was written by Verónica Iglesias, MA, a long-time ASWM member, curandera, and co-author of The Jade Oracle. The English translation of her letter says in part:

From the pen of María Suárez we travel through the Caribbean from ancient times, when the indigenous people were the only ones who reigned and existed in the territory, and then we also learn about part of the history of colonization, and later the arrival of people brought by force from Africa through two ships, mainly whose shipwreck brought these enslaved people to the coasts of Costa Rica.

This book has taken me to the Caribbean, specifically the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, and has made me travel in time learning about those indigenous groups of the area and their connection with African roots and the way in which these human beings, torn from Africa through slavery, arrived at the coasts. It has certainly been a journey of much learning.

As a woman born in Mexico, this work has made me feel part once again of the entire history of the continent, and of these issues that can sometimes still be painful. I speak of the periods of colonization and the loss of indigenous knowledge. these type of works are what allow us to heal these wounds, to remember it, to talk about it and to embrace the result of all these experiences, of why the inhabitants of this wonderful continent are who we are.

It is a wonderful work that I would love to recommend to all those who want to learn more about the history of this continent and specifically of Central America, the role of the indigenous people, the role of black history, the role of the colonizers, the role of the slave traders, all of this is part of who we are, it is part of our DNA in a certain way, so by embracing our history, we also embrace our total and complete existence, knowing that open wounds still exist in this continent.