I am an ecologist and ecological artist working across multiple media, including oil, acrylic, collage, and fiber. Much of my artwork emerges directly from my experiences as a scientist. I became an ecologist because I was driven by a desire to unravel the mysteries of nature and tell stories about life. Increasingly, however, I find myself documenting not life, but death.

At some point, I shifted from being an ecologist to becoming a kind of coroner for the Earth, recording the accelerating loss of species, ecosystems, and climate stability (see interview here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/climate-crisis-glacier-diana-six-ecologist). This transformation has been deeply unsettling.

My work as an ecological artist has become a way to process and express that grief—sometimes through anger, sometimes through quieter expressions of sorrow, and sometimes through celebration of the beauty that still remains. Through this work, I hope to challenge and reorganize personal perspectives about humanity’s relationship with the living world and our impacts upon it.

Diana Six is a professor emerita at the University of Montana in the USA, an extraordinary professor of ecology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, and a past Mercator Research Fellow (forest biodiversity) in Germany. She has received numerous awards including the E.O. Wilson Biotechnology Biodiversity Pioneer Award. She earned an AS degree in Microbiology from Chaffey College, a BS in Agricultural Biology (Integrated Pest Management) from California Polytechnic College, a MS and PHD in Entomology with an emphasis on Mycology from the University of California, Riverside, and was a postdoctoral researcher in Chemical Ecology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses widely on bark beetle and forest ecology, insect-fungus symbioses, climate change, population genetics, and forest adaptation.  She has published roughly 100 peer-reviewed papers.