Steward
Jote Lamar
Jote is a somatic artist and a participatory action researcher working at the intersection of pleasure agency, creative sovereignty and ancestral remembrance. They bring relational skills grounded in cultural somatics and systems thinking to the collaborative art and research project, Our Anatomy. Jote is passionate about creating communities of practice where we can research and reimagine what our body is and what it is for.
Jote believes that art and storytelling are two of the fastest ways to shift culture- the stories we tell and the images we see influence our sense of what is possible and what is real. Jote stewards Our Anatomy to leverage art, ancestral wisdom, community research and our personal stories of pleasure, pain and relationship to shift the ways we learn and teach about embodiment, ecology, governance, sexuality and spirituality.
Jote is continually inspired by the process of deepening in relationship. They studied a form of somatic psychology called the Hakomi Method and spent over fifteen years in the dynamic process of working with families and children in groups and one on one coaching. Jote co-founded and directed Five Creeks, a homeschool collective and forest school in Berkeley, California that was collaboratively run by teachers, parents, and students using sociocracy.
Jote is using Participatory Action Research and sociocracy to organize Our Anatomy. These structures give form to Jote’s focus on developing skills for large scale collaborations and culture shift. In addition to their role as steward and creative director of Our Anatomy, Jote also works as an organizational design consultant to develop inspiring and efficient cultures of collaboration. Learn how your organization can benefit from Jote’s skills here.
Collaborators
Tania Laisuna Villarreal Chamorro
Tania Laisuna Villarreal Chamorro was born in Pasto, Nariño, Colombia, and has walked the landscapes of the Andes, Pacific, and Amazon since childhood, learning alongside elders, culture keepers, and social researchers. Her early experiences with the Panamazonia Environmental School in the Sibundoy Valley, beginning in 1999, grounded her work in intergenerational participatory action research, environmental education, and the revitalization of local knowledge systems. She has co-led initiatives such as the Sibundoy Valley Food Sovereignty Network and the “Lovers of Orchids” regional women’s collective, integrating ecological stewardship with cultural preservation. She is now a co-founder and steward of La Realidad, a syntropic agriculture school and living laboratory in Putumayo, Colombia that is creating cultural alliance and food sovereignty through the remembrance of ancestral foods.
In 2008, Tania encountered the Dances of Universal Peace, a global movement blending music, movement, and spiritual practice. Recognizing their power as tools for cultural healing and social weaving, she trained extensively as a leader and mentor, eventually founding Nuh Jay in 2012. Through this collective, she has facilitated community art, ritual, and dialogue processes across Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and internationally—often working in contexts of post-conflict recovery, gender-based violence prevention, and the strengthening of cultural identity.
Tania’s studies include biology, orchid conservation, syntropic agriculture, project design and management, sound therapy, and intercultural leadership. Her work integrates ecological knowledge, embodied practice, and artistic expression to support communities in deepening their connection to land, culture, and one another. Across all her endeavors, she nurtures collective spaces where diversity is celebrated, the earthbody is honored, and communities remember their capacity for resilience, creativity, and peace.
Daniela Rodríguez
Carreño
Daniela is an anthropologist who graduated from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) with a focus on public and community health research. Her investigative, imaginative, and dissident explorations center on the somatic and sensitive body, weaving in therapeutic tools such as theater, singing, and sound exploration. Daniela approaches the body as geography, territory, and paradise.
For over a decade, she has collaborated with diverse rural, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, campesino, and urban communities—supporting the creation, planning, and implementation of social and community well-being projects. Her work is oriented toward caring for and strengthening the body-territory and its relationship with health, sustainability, ecological alternatives, and regenerative economies.
Advisors
Emile Suotanye DeWeaver
Emile DeWeaver became a published writer, community organizer, and co-founder of prisonrenaissance.org while serving a 67 year to life sentence. Gov. Brown granted him clemency in 2017. Emile is interested in internalized systems of oppression and how they prevent us from building and maintaining effective models of justice. He guest lectures at social justice venues and in universities about his written work, what he calls liberation models, and what he calls the lying fiction of criminality.
His written works comprise over 50 published articles, essays, short stories, poems, plays, and curricula. His community organizing includes education and communication campaigns to pass four senate bills and Proposition 57. His organization is the first nonprofit founded and run by incarcerated people. Their aim is to take prison administration out of prison programs as a step toward prison abolition.
Lara Catone
Lara Catone is a writer, educator, leadership coach and scholar-practitioner focusing on transforming dynamics of gender and sexuality to harness relational power. All of her work is devoted to culture creation that fosters justice, equality, dignity, beauty, mutual power, epic love, and a thriving earth.
Lara has facilitated diverse groups of youth and adults for 20 years through experiential, transformative education. A certified Somatic Sexologist, she maintained a private sexual wellness practice in Los Angeles for nine years working extensively with postpartum women. She is known as an innovator in somatic (body-based) healing and learning and for creating powerfully engaging, alchemical group spaces.
Lara is the founder of The Artemis School, offering adult sexuality education as well as training for health practitioners and sex educators. In 2014-2015 Lara produced the Sex Lab with Lara podcast. She holds a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership.
Lara’s work has been featured in Yoga Journal magazine, and she has been a featured speaker and guide at 1440 Multiversity, Lightning in a Bottle, Shakti Fest, and the Telluride Yoga Festival.
Lara lives inter-independently on the unceded territory of the Haudenosaunee (Finger Lakes region of New York state) resourced through a constellation of relationships with humans and the wild earth. Read Lara’s writing @ laracatone.com
Relating with the Elders
We are in a process of understanding which elders want to be named as advisors for Our Anatomy. This website is a step in clarifying the vision in a way that can be shared and consulted upon. Thank you to all the Andean and Amazonian elders who have opened the baskets of ancestral thought that have influenced the way Our Anatomy is growing.
When we began working on Our Anatomy, we knew we were stepping into a momentum that was much greater than any individual experience. What we did not realize was how eldership, animism and planetary anatomy would give a larger context to the research.
Through a series of unexpected twists and turns, Jote put Our Anatomy's research "on pause" in 2020 as a result of lock down and the inability to meet in person with the team that was forming. They ended up moving through the Andes and into Peru and Brazil studying with various elders and communities- sitting with the fire, listening to stories of origin and histories of colonization, singing and dancing with people of many cultures. This contact started to awaken Jote's ancestral memory. They began to feel the connection between the art and research of Our Anatomy and the traditions who have been studying planetary anatomy for ages.
Ancestral cosmovisions are not only interested in where we are going, but also, if not more so, they are interested in where life and consciousness come from. By studying our divine place of origin we have the opportunity to remember what is needed to create life, care for life and to live in harmony. This is an orientation with a distinctly different trajectory than Modernity's focus on progress, innovation and production.
Since 2017 Jote has been creating relationship with elders, mentors and collaborators who share the dream for humanity to have better pathways for learning and researching about embodiment and sexuality. The Andes are magnetic in this research and Jote is grateful to be collaborating with Tania and Daniela who grew up in those mountains.
Jote's artwork has been spiraling around themes of the body as landscape and landscape as body since their teenage years. They have long held the sexual organs and the whole body as a mysterious, mystical landscape. Being in contact with elders and traditions who study planetary anatomy and our place of origin inspired new vision for the study of the anatomy of arousal. Jote now holds the study of the sexual organs as a study of the closest physical place to our place of divine origin.
Here is an entry shared on Jote's Substack where they write about how their studies with the elders led them to begin calling the sexual organs the organs of origin.
Backstory
Jote Lamar and Lara Catone met through living in a cooperative household in Berkeley, CA, called Soma House. Lara, a sex educator and writer, had been dreaming into this project for a number of years. As the founder of The Artemis School, a training program for educators in women’s holistic sexuality, she found it nearly impossible to find complete anatomical maps to aid in teaching. On a sunny afternoon Jote was painting and Lara began to share about her desire to create accurate and beautiful images of the anatomy of arousal for people with vulvas. Jote has made art at the intersection of sensuality, body and landscape for many years was an immediate yes.
At the beginning, Our Anatomy was created to focus only on the human anatomy of arousal - to create pleasure positive learning pathways for embodied understanding of our sexual organs. The inspiration to make accurate images that affirm the wild diversity of our organs of origin led us away from the streamlined anonymity of modern anatomy textbooks. We set out to paint the lesser known aspects of our bodies- the real colors, shapes and stories that make us human creatures. This original impulse has become the pilot project, Revel Body, and Our Anatomy has expanded to include a study of our relationship with the erotic power of the earthbody and humanity's role as an organ of the earth.
In 2020, just as we received fiscal sponsorship from New York Foundation for the Arts, lockdown prevented us from meeting with the research team who was coming together. This change of plans spun Jote into studies with Andean elders and a web of collaborators appeared in Colombia and beyond. We thought Our Anatomy was on pause during those years, but it was actually the gestation phase of a much larger community of practice. All the while, Jote’s consciousness was being reformatted by listening to stories of origin from the Andean and Amazonian Cosmovisions, traditions who have been able to continue their studies of origin.
During this time relationships with elders and communities, especially in Colombia, flourished. Jote connected with Tania and Daniela at a minga for the regenerative arts and interest in Our Anatomy grew. They went on pilgrimages, spent time with the elders and became closer friends and allies. Tania began introducing Jote to elders who she thought would take an interest in Our Anatomy.
In April of 2025 Tania accompanied Jote in hosting the first residential research gathering for Our Anatomy. They wove participatory action research with ancestral wisdom traditions - practices that are actually very related. Tradition is not static. The elders are in a constant study. What they observe and receive from listening and relating with the earthbody informs them how to proceed. Participatory action research frames this as reflection and reiteration on the research process. The result of the collaboration was very positive and Tania and Jote are excited to continue collaborating.
Our Anatomy is planning a tour in Europe in the fall of 2025 where Tania and Jote will visit Daniela at her new home in Spain. We are in the process of creating a research gathering there.
And, as always, the story continues. We give gratitude to the continuance of life and all the traditions who support this study!