Michaela Mujica-Steiner is a performance artist and activist living in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Currently, she is working with East Boulder County United, Boulder DSA, and other local groups to stop fracking, and kick the political influence of fossil fuel CEOs out of her home state for good. She focuses on direct action campaigns, and multi-medium body-based performance art, exploring different ways in which our bodies can be tools for resistance or submission.
Michaela first became involved in the youth climate justice movement six years ago, doing a combination of work on campus-based fossil fuel divestment and working on bans and moratoriums on fracking with Colorado communities. Since then, she’s worked on a variety of campaigns and issues from being a Mentor in 350.org’s Training Corp Program to co-founding the Southwest Divestment Network as a regional organizer to working on Get Out the Vote efforts during the 2016 election cycle. She was a youth delegate with SustainUS at COP23, and is a returning delegate to COP24. Currently working in the community she grew up in, she feels devastated by the rapid expansion of oil and gas infrastructure, and feeling like her home is being turned into an oil field.
Graduating from Northern Arizona University with a BA in Gender and Women’s Studies, much of Michaela’s current work involves exploring and working at the intersections of gender and climate change. She intimately believes that the same colonial logic used to control and exploit resources is tied in with systemic oppression to control and exploit marginalized bodies and labor, and she finds that performance art is a unique, embodied medium to explore and make public this critical intersection. As a young person whose personal experiences of sexual assault and mental health challenges are a part of her commitment to collective liberation, Michaela brings this perspective into her work through intersectional partnership-building, translating personal experiences of bodily violation into nature based performance, and supporting groups to have healthy group cultures that intentionally promote self-care, and actively work to examine ways in which they are complicit in internal groups dynamics that perpetuate oppression.
In her free time, Michaela audits college classes and loves studying mythology, occultism, psychometrics, and sociology. For fun, she also co-facilitates a Social-Feminist reading group, and believes that political education and discussion is critical to the healthy progression of our movements for collective liberation. Her friends and community are extremely important to her, and she continually looks to build strong connections wherever she goes.
