Natalia Schwien (she/they) is an herbalist, wildlife rescue & rehabilitation apprentice, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research is around expanded ontologies of personhood, posthuman ethics, and diction in scientific discourse. She concurrently serves as the Associate Director for Harvard Divinity School's Program for the Evolution of Spirituality under Dr. Dan McKanan. The aim of the program is to support the scholarly study of emerging spiritual movements, marginalized spiritualities, and the innovative edges of established religious traditions. She formerly held the position of Sustainability Specialist at Middlebury College's Franklin Environmental Center in Vermont.

At Harvard, she leads "Interspecies Dialogues: A Conversation Group Exploring Animism, Posthumanism, and Entangled Roots of Interrelation" which regularly features a variety of scholars, writers, scientists, filmmakers, and animacy practitioners. She co-leads a reading group on plant consciousness in the Divinity School alongside Rachael Peterson, MDiv '24. Her re-wilding initiative, “The Harvard Micro-Prairie Project,” was a recipient two years in a row of the Harvard Office of Sustainability Living Labs Grant. 

Natalia began her training as an herbalist at 10 years old. From 2016-2019, she assisted her friend and teacher, Vanessa Chakour, on camping retreats to the New York Wolf Conservation Center, home to over 40 critically endangered wolves, all candidates for release. She has also assisted in eco-defense work in Costa Rica and with the Alladale Wilderness Reserve in Scotland. Concurrently, she pursued a horticulture certificate at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. She continues her herbalism practice privately. 

In spring 2019, she completed her Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation coursework and exam, before apprenticing in Vermont and Massachusetts. She has experience with squirrels, raccoons, skunks, foxes, otters, groundhogs, porcupines, bunnies, opossums, meadow voles, robins, and beavers; she currently volunteers with Newhouse Wildlife Rescue in Chelmsford, MA. 

Natalia holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School with a focus on the intersection of ecology and spiritual practice. She is also nearly through a Master of Arts degree from Middlebury College/Robert Frost's Bread Loaf School of English. Her research there focuses on fantasy literature, specifically on spiritual worldbuilding and how authors designate personhood through their imagined cosmology in secondary worlds. Before working in environmental spheres, she was a member of the inaugural artistic team for Brooklyn's National Sawdust and the founding Director for its in-home recording label, FKA Via Records. She graduated with a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2013. Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Vice, For The Wild, and more. She releases music under the moniker Ellayo. Her personal website is selkieprojects.com