Drone footage of Surf Point by Chris Cardoza / Doza Visuals
SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2027 | YORK, MAINE
Community Day #15: Celebrating International Biodiversity Day curated by Marisa Mazria Katz
Join us at Surf Point for our 15th Community Day curated by journalist, producer, and educator Marisa Mazria Katz as we celebrate International Biological Diversity Day through hands-on artistic, ecological, and activist engagement with Surf Point’s coastal landscape. Additional program details and participating presenters will be announced as they are confirmed.
The event invites visitors of all ages to explore Surf Point’s living ecosystem while reflecting on the environmental challenges facing the Maine coast and imagining creative paths toward stewardship and collective action. Planned programming includes guided foraging and landscape mapping, collaborative environmental sound recording, and creative workshops focused on environmental awareness and public action. Participants will engage directly with the landscape and leave with tangible and artistic tools for responding to environmental change.
Surf Point’s 45-acre oceanfront, marshland, and woods are governed by a conservation easement managed by the York Land Trust.
Community Days are free and open to the public. Registration is required. Address and directions to Surf Point will be shared via email in advance of the event.
Donations are optional and deeply appreciated. Surf Point is a 501c3 public charity. In order to maintain our public charity status, we must raise funds from the broad public to show support beyond large donations. Your support in any amount, from $1, is beneficial to Surf Point being able to demonstrate public support and supports our programs. Learn more about Surf Point here.
For questions, please contact info@surfpoint.me
About the Host
Marisa Mazria Katz
Marisa Mazria Katz is a journalist and radio reporter of Syrian descent. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, NPR, Marketplace, Time and The New York Review of Books.
Past editorial projects have been awarded major grants from the Keith Haring Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2009 she received funding from the US State Department for a four-year program that taught journalism to teenagers from a marginalized community in Casablanca, Morocco. In 2018 Mazria Katz served as one of the first Kickstarter Fellows, and later that year she founded the Craig Newmark Philanthropies–funded program the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism. The program—whose central mission is to support artists seeking to make work for major media publications like The New Yorker, The Guardian, Wiredand The Atlantic—has helped facilitate pieces that have gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize, Emmy, New York Press Club award, and a SXSW Film Festival 2021 Special Jury Recognition for Immersive Journalism.
Mazria Katz was the founding editor of Creative Time Reports. The program’s key goal was to publish artists’ unflinching perspectives on the most challenging issues of our times. With Creative Time Reports, artists were correspondents and brought their own unique spin to current events. Under her tenure, the website co-published Creative Time Reports content with The Guardian, Al Jazeera America, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Slate, Salon, The Intercept and many more. In 2019, she published with Paper Chase Press and Creative Time, Artists on the News, a selection of work from Creative Time Reports.
In 2023, Mazria Katz co-founded the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting, a first-of-its-kind initiative that generates meaningful collaboration between journalists and artists in order to ensure powerful public interest stories have more impact and greater emotional resonance.
Learn more about Marisa at her website.
