College of Agriculture & Natural Resources Department of Fisheries and Wildlife

Major Advisor: 

Mark Axelrod

Biography:

Marinna hails from the verdant Sasquatch habitat that is the Pacific Northwest (specifically, Corvallis, Oregon). She has always been interested in the interface between humans and their environment, which led her to pursue an interdisciplinary academic course of study. Marinna holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Vassar College, where, for her senior thesis, she explored GMO technology through the framework of a narrative feature screenplay. She also holds an M.F.A. in Sound Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her M.F.A. thesis was informed by R. Murray Schaefer’s concept of the ‘soundscape,’ which, broadly defined, is the sonic environment: she developed a design methodology for the creation of historic soundscapes, using the Owens-Thomas House, a historical house museum in Savannah, GA as her case study. She has published work about this and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the soundscape of Los Angeles in Folklife, the digital publication of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. At MSU, she is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Mark Axelrod. Her research interests center around the human dimensions of the impacts of climate change on Great Lakes fisheries, specifically socio-ecological resilience, with an emphasis on working with Indigenous communities. In her spare time, Marinna enjoys practicing the art of cat photography, making abstract sound compositions, and ruminating on the differences between East and West Coast synthesis philosophies.