ABOUT
The mission of Guerrilla Cartography is to widely promote the cartographic arts and facilitate an expansion of the art, methods, and thematic scope of cartography, through collaborative projects, hosting theme-based community workshops and symposiums, and mounting public exhibitions.
Below is the story of our founding and why it matters to us. But like most things, there is a story that goes back farther than the beginning of Guerrilla Cartography. Read our origin story at the Mission Possible tab.
HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY
Founded on the idea that a new paradigm for cooperative and collaborative knowledge-caching and -sharing could have a transformative effect on the awareness and dissemination of spatial information, Guerrilla Cartography formed in 2012 to create Food: An Atlas.
The food atlas project was an experiment in guerrilla cartography and publishing. An open call for maps was shared and re-shared through a network of people who care about geography or food (or both) and the cartographers and researchers decided by their submissions what would be in the atlas.
The atlas was published by a consortium of supporters using a crowd-funding platform—the people made the atlas, literally gave it form. The project garnered a lot of media attention—for its content and its methodology—and we continue to receive requests for content to mount public and web-based exhibits. The food atlas is in its second printing.
Our experiment in guerrilla cartography created more than an atlas. With more than 120 collaborators from 15 countries, the first guerrilla cartography project created a community—one that continues to grow. Our second atlas, Water: An Atlas, is also supported by crowdfunding and has even more maps!
As we began working on Shelter: An Atlas, the final in our trilogy of basic needs atlases, we wondered if we could take guerrilla atlas making to a new level and decided to try to make an atlas in one day. The first Atlas in a Day was Migration and was such a fun, exciting and successful project, we did it again—in the middle of the pandemic! Atlas in a Day: Community was the result and, like Migration, it is smashing!
Shelter: An Atlas was published in March, 2023, and completes the the trilogy of the three basic needs for survival: Food, Water, Shelter.
As a registered California 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Guerrilla Cartography is committed to a free and open distribution of information. We sell volumes to support our organization but always allow free download of our content and pledge a share of our printed volumes to schools and libraries at no cost.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
As a registered California nonprofit, Guerrilla Cartography operates with a board of directors.
DARIN JENSEN, BOARD PRESIDENT
Darin Jensen founded Guerrilla Cartography in 2012 to foster collaborative work and communal knowledge-caching and -sharing among the global cartographic arts community. He has been a cartographer since the last century and holds a BA in Geography from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Mills College in Oakland. He works for the University of California as a Geographer and Data Visualization Analyst. Darin lives in Oakland with his three kids.
alicia cowart, vice president
Alicia Cowart is a cartographer and geographer working in higher education. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California-Berkeley and a BA in Art History and Anthropology. She has held both staff and faculty positions at the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Colorado-Denver, and most recently the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is currently the Creative Director of the UW Cartography Lab.
Maia wachtel, BOARD SECRETARY
Maia Wachtel is a teacher living and working in the East Bay. Before teaching, she worked as a volunteer- and family engagement-coordinator with an Oakland-based early childhood literacy organization. She holds a B.A. in Geography from UC Berkeley and an M.A. in Education and teaching credential from Stanford University. Maia views storytelling (visual, oral, written) as a powerful tool for building community, and is particularly interested in questions of access to and representation in texts. She currently teaches English at Berkeley High School with an emphasis on non-dominant narratives.
charles drucker, BOARD TREASURER
Charles Drucker is a cultural anthropologist who has worked in academia, the publishing industry, and the non-profit sector. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University based on field research in the highland Philippines. He has worked as an editor for Friends of the Earth, Macmillan, and Pearson Education, and as a data manager and policy analyst for the University of California. His current interests include cartography, photography, and digital ethnographic archives.
Ross Bernet
Ross Bernet is a life-long environmentalist and map lover. His first job out of college was as the Project Director for a tree-planting NGO in Haiti. He got his Master’s Degree at the Yale School of Forestry, where he focused on GIS and Remote Sensing. He worked at a GIS B Corp for a few years in Philadelphia before moving to California and starting work at a tree planting non profit, One Tree Planted. Ross loves people, nature, bikes, maps, and teaching.
zachary loran
Zachary Loran is a Data Analyst based in the East Bay. He graduated from UCLA in 2021 with a double major in Statistics and Geography, and a minor in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Zachary has experience applying techniques in data analysis, data visualization, machine learning, and data mining, to help build SaaS products, enhance GIS projects, and contribute to quantitative psychology research. He is interested in the intersection between the analytical and artistic sides of cartography, and how this intersection yields a powerful tool to illustrate spatial relationships and shape narratives.
Susan powell
Susan Powell is the GIS & Map Librarian at University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Cal she was a GIS Specialist with the Yale University Library. She has masters’ degrees in both Geography and Library Science from Indiana University, and is interested in new mapping technologies, data accessibility, and Mongolia, among other things.
nic reale
Nick Reale was born on a busy archipelago off the coast of America, and ever since he has been forging a path as a multidisciplinary artist. He designs maps in order to vigorously investigate how we form meaning from the experience we have relating to ourselves, to each other, to our environment, and our shared history. Under the moniker ThisIsNotReale, he works with music festivals, journalistic publications, NGOs, novelists, game designers, and others. Additionally, he has created and developed Dérive, an ongoing series of collaborative art projects influenced by the process of mapmaking. When not making maps, he assumes the role of the self-proclaimed weatherman wherever he lives and keeps his childhood fantasy land called “Continental” alive and well.