ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Jasmine Afshar served in the army and developed multiple illnesses from her grueling time in service, allowing her to reexperience the world through empathic eyes. She began visiting sites of exploitation to document moments of raw emotion expressed by sentient beings. Since then she has devoted herself to her community in Phoenix, Arizona, engaging in various actions for animals.

Chase Avior found his calling in animal rights activism and dedicates the vast majority of his time to it. His work includes creating motivating animal rights videos, organizing protests and outreach events, making music, writing speeches, and training activists. He is currently based in Berkeley, California.

Gene Baur has been hailed as “the conscience of the food movement” by Time magazine and has campaigned to end factory farming abuses since 1985. His undercover images have aired internationally, and his rescue work inspired a global farm sanctuary movement. Gene led efforts to pass the first US laws banning factory farm cruelties and continues advocating for food system reforms. He is the author of two bestselling books and was named one of Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 Givers.

Dotsie Bausch is an Olympic medalist, speaker, and founder of Switch4Good, a health- and performance-focused nonprofit that encourages a dairy-free lifestyle. She had a fourteen-year professional cycling career concluding with a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics. She stars in the 2018 film The Game Changers, is featured in the Netflix documentary Personal Gold, and gave a TEDx Talk.

Alex Bez is the founder and director of the nonprofit organization Amazing Vegan Outreach. He leverages his background in corporate sales, coaching, public speaking, and adult learning in order to train activists to be highly effective advocates for nonhuman animals. Alex lives in Toronto, Canada, and travels widely to present AVO workshops and engage in other forms of activism.

Matthew Braun is a former investigator of farms and slaughterhouses and has been vegan since 2006, but regretfully didn’t call himself an activist until 2013. Since then he has made it a point to try every type of activism at least once, even if it is outside of his comfort zone. He’s originally from Schenectady, New York and currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Saengduean Lek Chailert, founder of Save Elephant Foundation in Thailand, is internationally recognized for her elephant conservation and rescue work and has been featured in documentaries produced by National Geographic, Discovery, Animal Planet, and the BBC. In 2010, she was honored as one of six Women Heroes of Global Conservation by Hillary Rodham Clinton, and, in 2005, she was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of Asia. The documentary Vanishing Giants, which highlights Lek’s work, was recognized by The Humane Society of the United States’s Genesis Award in 2003. In 2001, she received the Ford Foundation’s “Hero of the Planet.”

Amy Jean Davis came to Los Angeles in 2008 as a top-24 Finalist on American Idol. She’s cofounder of the animal sanctuary Love Always. In 2016, she started Los Angeles Animal Save, part of the global Save Movement. She also works for Nation Earth, the production company behind the documentaries Earthlings and Unity, with filmmaker and partner Shaun Monson.

Karen Davis is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl, including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Liberation, she is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale; and For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation.

Sean Hill is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and humanitarian with the focus of supporting universal inner and outer peace in a realistic and passionate way. He helped build two gender-equal schools in Malawi and Nepal. As a SAG actor, host, speaker, and workshop facilitator, he has shared stages with Oscar winners, Grammy winners, and youth home children.

Wayne Hsiung is cofounder of the animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). Prior to founding DxE, Wayne was an attorney and visiting assistant professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at MIT. His father did work involving vivisection for several years, which had a lasting impact on Wayne and motivated him to become an animal rights activist.

Gwenna Hunter was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and now resides in Los Angeles, California. As the event coordinator for Vegan Outreach and the founder of Vegans of LA, Gwenna enjoys bringing people together for social functions designed for networking and mingling and creating a space for people to experience new and delicious vegan foods.

Anita Krajnc is the founder of the Save Movement, which started in late 2010 with Toronto Pig Save. She holds a PhD in political science and applies Tolstoyan and Gandhian strategies of bearing witness, nonviolent direct action, and love-based community organizing to animal rights and climate actions.

Cory Mac a’Ghobhainn is an artist and a former ESL teacher, author, and editor, who has lived in various cities in the United States, as well as Germany and Iran as a child and Mexico as an adult. She is an organizer with several activist groups, but works primarily with Progress for Science, an anti-vivisection organization. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Jo-Anne McArthur, photographer and the founder of We Animals Media, has been documenting our complex relationship with animals in almost sixty countries for over fifteen years. She was the subject of the acclaimed documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine and is the author of two books, We Animals and Captive, as well as the cofounder of The Unbound Project, which celebrates women animal advocates worldwide. Her work has been used by hundreds of organizations, media, and academics. Toronto, Canada, is her home.

Zafir Molina was born in La Paz, Bolivia, and moved to California at the age of four. Drawn to psychology, justice, the arts, and working with youth, she started a dance organization in 2015 that focuses on raising awareness through the art of movement. She is dedicated to continuously seeking personal growth in order to help bring peace to humanity, animals, and the Earth.

Shaun Monson is the writer/director of the documentaries Earthlings (2005), and Unity (2015) and coproducer of Dominion (2018). His first film, narrated by Academy Award Nominee Joaquin Phoenix, is available in over forty languages. His follow-up film, Unity, features a cast of one hundred celebrity narrators, including twelve Oscar winners, and is available in more than two hundred countries and a dozen languages. Produced under his production company, Nation Earth, Shaun’s films carry a similar theme, “Not the same but equal.”

Ingrid E. Newkirk is the president and founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)—the largest animal rights organization in the world, with more than 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide. Newkirk—who was recently profiled by the Los Angeles Times and is the subject of the HBO documentary I Am an Animal—founded PETA in 1980, when no one knew what a vegan was. She started a movement that has changed society’s attitudes toward animals and has won a tidal wave of landmark victories, including the end of car-crash tests on animals, the closure of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus after 146 years, fur-free policies enacted by almost every major designer, and bans on animal testing by nearly four thousand personal-care product companies.

Natasha & Luca, “That Vegan Couple” are social media influencers from Australia who have over twenty-five million views on their YouTube channel and millions more across social media. They create educational and entertaining video content to help people transition to veganism and empower vegans to become activists. They also host a podcast show that covers a variety of vegan topics, organize international activism tours (including workshops and events), and have been invited as speakers at international animal rights events and conferences.

Alexandra Paul is an actress who has appeared in more than one hundred films and TV shows. She is best known for starring as Lt. Stephanie Holden on the television series Baywatch. She is a certified health coach and cohosts the Switch4Good podcast about plant-based living. She resides in Los Angeles.

Brittany Peet is the Director of Captive Animal Law Enforcement for the PETA Foundation. She works on behalf of animals who are held captive in roadside zoos, traveling shows, and the film and television industries through legal and regulatory actions, and public advocacy campaigns. She also negotiates and coordinates wild and exotic animal rescues.

Jill Robinson is founder and CEO of Animals Asia. She divides her time between mainland China, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, and travels frequently around the world to give presentations at conferences and fundraising events. Born in the UK, Jill is the recipient of an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, the Reader’s Digest “Hero for Today” award, The Humane Society of the United States’s Genesis Award, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Zoe Rosenberg, a dedicated teenage animal rights activist, founded Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary at age eleven, which has now saved more than eight hundred lives. Zoe is the social media coordinator for Direct Action Everywhere, and she travels the country speaking on the importance of taking action for animals.

Dani Rukin is an active member of the Save Movement and Anonymous for the Voiceless, an organizer for Direct Action Everywhere in Portland, Oregon, and founding coorganizer of Compassionate PDX, a grassroots fur ban campaign. She’s also a citizen journalist for digital media outlet JaneUnChained News.

Jasmin Singer is the author of the memoir Always Too Much and Never Enough (Berkley, 2016), cohost of the Our Hen House podcast, Senior Features Editor for VegNews, and Media Director for Switch4Good. She presented the TEDx Talk “Compassion Unlocks Identity” and is featured in the documentaries Vegucated and Ghosts in Our Machine. Her new book about going vegan will be released by Da Capo in 2020.

Kathy Stevens is the founder of Catskill Animal Sanctuary, one of the world’s leading sanctuaries for farmed animals. She is the author of Where the Blind Horse Sings and Animal Camp, a former Huffington Post blogger, and the host of All Beings Considered, a weekly podcast featuring prominent thought leaders and everyday people working to change the world for animals.

Dr. Will Tuttle, visionary author of the acclaimed bestseller The World Peace Diet, published in sixteen languages, is a recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award and the Empty Cages Prize. He is also the author of several other books on spirituality, intuition, and social justice, as well as the creator of online wellness and advocacy programs. A vegan since 1980 and former Zen monk, he is featured in a number of documentaries and is a frequent radio, television, and online presenter.

Gillian Meghan Walters is a registered clinical counselor with an MA degree in Counseling Psychology. She is the founder of radio show Animal Voices Vancouver, cofounder of BC Vegan Magazine, and the author and illustrator of two children’s books: King Zoom and the Great Seal Pup Rescue (2015), and King Zoom the Vegan Kid: Animals Used for Food (2018). She writes about the intersections between animal and human oppression and the psychology of veganism. In 2019, she launched MummyMOO, a photography blog.