The co-founders Destiny Kinal and Judith Thomas:
Destiny Kinal ~ destinykin22@gmail.com
Destiny Kinal, a dyed-in-the-wool western New York State-er, lives in Berkeley Ca where her daughters and six granddhildren live in close proximity to each other.
Destiny and Judith Thomas co-founded Reinhabitory Institute and sitio tiempo press in 2009, bioregional collectives with the intent to serve their home watersheds, increase collaboration across likeminded groups, and publish small editions of beautiful books.
Destiny continues to be informed by her activism in the 1960’s, in SDS against the war in Vietnam, in Johnson’s War on Poverty as a community organizer, and by her training at Indiana University’s School of Behavioral Sciences in cross-correlating behaviors and attitudes. Her hidden tech geek side paved the way in the 1980’s for a collaboration with SRI, as a prognosticator to the major consumer good companies, shifting them toward serving their new lifestyle constituents.
While that faceted career—which spanned three decades—continues to shape the programs Destiny has founded and run, largely in the eastern U.S., she has also been working on The Textile Trilogy—an fictional examination of what we left behind in the nineteenth century as a people— since graduating from Bennington’s MFA program twenty years ago. Burning Silk, the first novel in the trilogy, won a 2011 First Book award and was well reviewed. The second novel Linen Shroud, will be introduced in 2016.
Kinal’s involvement in textiles through this decades-long writing project, has fed her partnership with Judith in textiles, and led them both into collaborations with Fibershed, with learning to weave, grow flax and indigo, and pursue this aspect of our traditional culture. Project GROW, which she founded six years ago on the Susquehanna River, cemented her love for teaching children in a gardening and cooking setting, a passion which rises up every spring to plant and again at harvest. RI is working with select schools in the East Bay to plant and learn about the plants that intrigue them like Three Sisters.
Kinal and Judith both enjoy creating products—both the ephemeral and the persistent—out of the natural world: dyes, cordials, fiber medicines.
Judith Thomas ~ plumjum37@gmail.com
Judith Thomas, one of the cofounders of Reinhabitory Institute, has been a craftswoman and handwork teacher all of her adult life.
Judith founded Ariadne’s Thread and a chapter of Weaving a Life in Berkeley, CA. Judith, also skilled in bookbinding and pine needle basketmaking, has led Reinhabitory lnstitute’s ongoing investment and interest in the field of textiles, dyes and basketmaking.
Judith Thomas and Destiny Kinal’s partnership has cultivated a strong interest in textiles, often in collaboration with other organizations like Fibershed, Richmond Arts Center, Waldorf Schools, UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens, Chico Cloth, and CIBA, California Indian Basketmakers Association.
Judith Thomas was born in northern Ohio, the state her family had been inhabiting since the Western Reserve was opened. She was raised in Ohio, western New York, Illinois, and then outside of New York City. She spent four years at college in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts and then moved to the West Coast for graduate school at U. C. Berkeley.
Judith has lived in Berkeley ever since, through the years of the civil rights movement and the protests against the War in Vietnam. She was one of the founders of The Circus, a commune in Berkeley where she lived for three years.
When her two children were young, Judith was part of the founding group of the East Bay Waldorf School. She taught in the school for twenty years, as a class teacher and as the handwork teacher.
Judith now teaches weaving, basketry, and book arts out of her studio in Berkeley. She is a collaborative partner with Destiny Kinal in Reinhabitory Institute and sitio tiempo press.
