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Ocean

Enviro-Arts & Media

I create public engagement experiences that merge science with performance, poetry, and film to innovative ocean-arts courses — sparking dialogue about our shared blue backyards.

Performing Arts

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Ocean Improv Poetry Table – Tour Stops

  • Georgetown Steam Plant (Monthly Open House & STEAM Science Fair)

  • Burke Museum— Women in STEAM Day

  • Waterfront Park, Seattle — Season Launch Party

  • UW Friday Harbor Labs — Marine Science Meets Typewriter Improv

  • Placencia Village, Belize — Community Stakeholder Event

  • Equinox Studios — Open House

Follow the Ocean Improv Poetry Table on
Bluesky & Instagram (@Sci-StoriesProject):

  • Instagram
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Ocean Improv Poetry Table

Typewriter meets tidepool in a pop-up ocean poetry lab.

At the Ocean Improv Poetry Table, I guide guests in co-creating custom, sea-inspired poems. I use a vintage typewriter and improv theater techniques to blend science, and art to spark curiosity about the ocean. Participants leave with a one-of-a-kind poem—and a more personal connection to the coastline they share.

Since launched in Fall 2024, over 63 poems written, 97 poets engaged, 109 visitors hosted

Ghosts of the Hatchery

A haunted hatchery comes alive with voices from the past.

Set inside the disbanded University of Washington hatchery, I am developing an immersive play that brings historical and future voices into dialogue about the promise and peril of hatchery science. Based on archival research and interviews I conducted with scientists across generations, Ghosts of the Hatchery asks: Do we save salmon—or their engineered ghosts? Equal parts environmental history and eerie spectacle, it blurs the line between science and myth. Show premieres Halloween 2026 at the historic hatchery site.

Show art previews hand-drawn and crafted

by Xochitl Clare (above).

"UW losing 60-year tradition of salmon returning to campus": Classes for students interested in careers in fisheries management are no longer conducted using the pond or fish run, as they once were. The run of salmon at the UW hatchery started in 1949 and the fish pond completed in 1961. The facility closed in 2010 due to budget constraints, shifting research goals, and stakeholder concerns. This play investigates sentiments around its closure and lessons learned from our scientific past from UW School of Fisheries, a hallmark institution in fisheries science.​​

(Photos from 1951, 1980s, & 2006, article link)

Film & Media

Visual teaser for 3-year community filmmaking initiative

(2023-2025)

Impact at a Glance (2023–2025)

  • Filmed, edited, and directed by Xochitl Clare

  • 3-year community filmmaking initiative rooted in Seattle’s Carkeek Park

  • Centered local voices: salmon stewards, community leaders, and advocates

  • Handheld camcorder ethnography for intimacy and authenticity

Feeding the Sound

The return of salmon to urban streams, a community’s story.

This documentary follows Seattle’s Carkeek Park salmon runs in Piper's Creek and the people sustaining them—from community leaders to environmental advocates. I produced and filmed this footage in collaboration with its subjects, via a handheld camcorder to capture intimate narratives. Feeding the Sound reframes food and ecosystem justice through a local lens with global relevance. It invites audiences to reconnect with the ecosystems—and neighbors—that champion them. The ethnography work in this Feeding the Sound has spearheaded Imprinting Futures, a community led urban watershed restoration science project I am developing.

Disposable Camera Project

Capturing conservation through participants’ eyes.

In Belize’s Placencia Village, I use disposable camera analog photography to turn fieldwork into a shared visual diary. Participants document their own perspectives, building connection beyond language and celebrating their role in community-led science. This tactile, low-tech approach invites people to remember twice—once when taking the photo, and again when it’s developed. This narrative-centered project increases participant sense-of-belonging in my ecosystem monitoring project, EcoTrace. The project created a sense of belonging, broke language barriers, and revealed conservation through the eyes of those living it in the field.

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A forthcoming anthology will gather these moments into a visual diary of field life.

Previews of anthology collection, Placencia Stills (2024-2026)

Education

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(Co-Facilitators: Marjorie Wonham and Geneviève Gaiser Tremblay)

FHL Ocean Arts Workshop

Where marine science meets creative practice.

"Marine Science, Ocean Arts: Interdisciplinary, Intertidal, Interdependent"--I co-facilitated this innovative workshop at University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories. First-of-its-kind, this workshop united scientists, artists, and educators to explore ocean change through both fieldwork and creative expression. Participants gained new lab skills, produced original artworks, and built interdisciplinary empathy—emerging with fresh ways to observe, imagine, and share the living ocean.

First-ever interdisciplinary arts cohort at Friday Harbor Labs

Other Works

Education

  • Motion in the Ocean — K–12 Hip Hop Science Program in Seattle Public Schools (PopRox Studios)

  • REEFlections — Marine science communication research symposium, University of California, Santa Barbara (2019-present)

Film & Media

  • BioOne Ambassador Award, 2023 (Film): "It's all about relationships"

  • Otra Voz, 2022 (Film), Bocas del Toro, Panama

Publications

  • Monstrous Utopias: Performance and the Radical Possibilities of Hope (2026)

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