Carol Padberg is an artist, writer and the founding co-director of the international Confluence MFA at the University of New Mexico. Padberg weaves with Oyster mushrooms, using yarn from her sheep that is colored by plants from her dye fields. As an herbalist she crafts remedies from cultivated and foraged herbs. Her art practice includes making regenerative textiles using ancestral spinning and weaving technologies, and walking the Questa Mine Superfund Site area where she weaves her letters to that mountain with drone imagery of remediation work. She is currently developing the Mess Kit for Settlers, an artwork that straddles poetic and practical interventions for descendants of settlers. Her art has been the subject of exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Her initiatives have been featured at the Walker Art Center, MoMA, and the Creative Time Summit at the Venice Biennale. Her recent writings can be found in the Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices (Punctum Press, 2022), EcoArt in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities (NYU Press, 2022) and The New Farmer’s Almanac (Greenhorns Press, 2023). A mother of three adult children, she lives and shepherds on unceded Tewa land in Alcalde, New Mexico.