Amey Yun Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) for environment and society as part of the research group “Learning Nature” directed by Francesca Mezzenzana. She is interested in children’s practices of interacting with other minds and of communicating with the nonhuman. 

Before the RCC, Amey studied ecology, evolutionary biology, cognitive anthropology, and art. She has been a studio art teaching assistant at Dartmouth College, a research fellow in animal cognition at the University of Auckland, and a storyteller at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. 

Amey enjoys storytelling through writing, comics, illustration, and animation. She loves collaboration and is particularly interested in using multimodal forms - like comics - to explore the mind across individuals and species. She was recently the graduate convenor of the Oxford Comics Network and is currently co-authoring a graphic ethnography with linguistic anthropologist Anna Corwin.

This year, in collaboration with the artist Sam Hopkins, Amey and James ran workshops for children in schools in Munich experimenting with different ways of relating to trees. In addition, Amey ran several workshops on the comics medium, and attended training in Level 1 P4C (Philosophy for Children, Colleges, and Communities) in London.

Amey is currently on fieldwork in upstate New York.