Interview with Lisa DePiano

Wondering how to create a right livelihood that combines many disciplines into high-impact, regenerative work? 

A leading permaculture teacher, organizer and innovator for over a decade, both at the grassroots and university level, Lisa DePiano is grounded at the intersections of public art, economic development, participatory design and social justice. She came to permaculture from a background as a community organizer in West Virginia working against Mountain Top Removal and for global justice. She sees permaculture as a tool to see connections between social, ecological and economic problems and to create solutions for the world we know is possible.

In her interview, Lisa shared stories and insights from Parkways–going from a one-day pop-up urban permablitz in a parking spot in Cambridge to having 5 parklets on Broadway in NYC; collaborating with Pandora Thomas to apply permaculture principles socially, and to design women’s permaculture leadership trainings; as well as musings from the greywater install at Occupy Wall Street and taking permaculture back into the academy with the innovative program at UMass.

Lisa is featured in the award winning documentary, Inhabit a Permaculture Perspective and her company,  Mobile Design Lab, which specializes in participatory permaculture design  “permablitz” installation’s include the grey water system at Occupy Wall Street, the Parkways tiny food forest park in a parking spot on Broadway and the Lee Street Public Forest Garden in Cambridge, MA.

She is a certified permaculture designer/teacher, and Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts and was a research fellow at the MIT Media Lab.

Lisa has extensive experience in social enterprise and worker cooperative development including co-founding the Montview Neighborhood Farm, one of the first worker-run human powered urban-farm and edible forest gardens in the country and establishing the bicycle powered compost program while riding with the worker-owned collective Pedal People.

For over a decade she has taught permaculture to hundreds of students in dozens of courses in the United States and abroad, including the Permaculture Women’s Teacher Training mentioned above. She is board member for the Permaculture Association of the Northeast (PAN) currently developing bottom up quality standards for permaculture education.