About — Unfolding Aliveness

Unfolding Aliveness is an educational-ecological-artistic-space, studio, and practice which attends to and creates with multispecies world/s.

Founded by Matthew Bejtlich and Charlotte Hankin, it is our response to an increasingly ravaged planet, one marked by the epoch ‘Anthropocene’; a planetary boundary marked by human in/action. Charlotte and Matthew feel concern for the future/s of all life on this planet and seek out hope-full, generative and imaginative responses to attend-to, heal, provoke, agitate, conjure up alternative ways of living (and dying) together.

Unfolding Aliveness is a space for like-minded people to come together, to share stories, create art, listen, learn, and give back through varied expressions of communion with others. Together, we might inspire new ways of noticing our strange, mysterious and beautiful world/s and write new narratives that are co-authored by many and not just the few.

For all inquires, collaborations, and classes:
matt@unfoldingaliveness.com
charlotte@unfoldingaliveness.com

Matthew Bejtlich is an educator, data scientist, and artist who dances across disciplines and institutions—teaching ecological design, systems thinking, data science, and storytelling at Rhode Island School of Design, Northeastern University, and Curry College. With playful curiosity, Matthew crafts tools, platforms, and stories that invite dialogue, collaboration, and spontaneous encounters. He is particularly drawn to artistic and sound-based methodologies that help us attune to the subtle ecologies of place, inviting deeper, more intimate relationships.

Matthew is interested in creating spaces for improvisation, exchange, and polyphony—softening boundaries and making space for voices often unheard. He is co-founder of Unfolding Aliveness, an educational-ecological-artistic space, studio, and practice which attends to and creates with multispecies worlds, and serves as an AI Fellow with the Transformations Community. He is currently a PhD student in Management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, studying regenerative strategy and sustainability transformations, with a focus on ecological and multispecies literacy.

He was mentored in sound design by Bradley Zero, founder of Rhythm Section International in London, and DJ at NTS Radio/BBC Radio.
He holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and an MSc in Data Science from Brown University.

Charlotte Hankin is an international educator with twenty two years’ experience in a variety of roles including teacher, leader, school-to-school consultant and education policy advisor for the UK government, working in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Bali. Charlotte has dedicated her professional life to championing the lives of children and the natural world, deepening knowledge, wisdom and finesse in curricula design, professional development, sustainability for education, and creative and critical dispositions for learning.

Charlotte is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Education, University of Bath working at the nexus of theory and practice. Her doctoral inquiry explores animal-child relations to consider how international schools might shift from human-exceptionalism to more regenerative pedagogical practices. Charlotte employs posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories and practices to co-create playful, arts-based research with animals and children.

In an increasingly fragile and precarious world, Charlotte believes that educational ecosystems could design more learning experiences that help us all to notice and attend to the living and non-living contributions to the world around us. Exploring and expressing the complex relationships in our world with creativity and sensitivity helps us all to develop care, responsibility and hope for more generative, flourishing futures.