Celia Bartlet (Wimborne, England)
Celia completed a Masters in Development Management earlier this year. Her experiences of and observations relating to taking upsurfing in her late 30’s, meant Celia was keen to further explore the sport’s prevailing gender dynamics. She therefore focussed her dissertation on institutional barriers to women’s recreational surfing in the UK.
As a mother of 2, Celia has been fitting her studies around raising her children. Since completing her Masters, Celia has been involved with gender policy development for a small NGO. She also recently
accepted a 3 month research position with the Fairtrade Foundation. Before having children, Celia worked for Oxfam GB.
Stein Boodts (Haverfordwest, Wales)
I grew up in a watersports loving family in Flanders, Belgium. My dad is a fanatic catamaran sailor so I grew up with a love for the ocean and many different water sports. From windsurfing, sailing, being one of the first female kitesurfers in Belgium to now pretty much living for surfing.
After my Physical Education studies in Ghent, Belgium, I travelled and worked abroad in NZ, French Polynesia and Europe. In 2012 I ‘settled down’ by the South Wales Coast with my Welsh husband. First in the Gower, now we live in Pembrokeshire.
In 2015, after years of trying to find reliable swimwear in Europe that would stay on in the surf, I founded Seafoam. Seafoam is an online destination for ethical and sustainable surfwear. It offers women-powered labels from across the world for oceanwomen of all shapes, styles and sizes. It also tries to inspire fellow female surfers through regular blogposts highlighting women in surfing. The current ‘Surf Careers’ series is a very popular read. I currently run Seafoam from home as a passion project next to my day job as a supply primary school teacher, but hope that one day it can become my full time job.
The ocean has become my life saver more recently after going through a tragic double loss. In November 2017 my first baby was stillborn 8 weeks before her due date and my mother lost her battle with cancer on the same day. Surfing and being in the water has been my only therapy and I can honestly say it saved my sanity. 💙🌊
Looking forward to meeting many of you after years of being in touch online!
Martina Burtscher (Vienna, Austria) Joining us remotely from Sri Lanka.
Frances Carey (Swansea, Wales)
Frances Carey grew up in Pembrokeshire and therefore in the sea. Surfing, windsurfing, kitesurfing you name the water sport the Careys did it! Frances started competing in keelboats and yachts from 16 years old, all around the UK and then farther afield in Europe.
Frances worked as a sailing and windsurfing coach for the then Welsh National Sailing centre Plas Menai. In her winters she was skiing and snowboarding in the Alps. At the age of 21 she went to Swansea University and trained as an osteopath. She worked in Cardiff and then London in Great Ormond Street Hospital. After spending 18 months in London she missed the sea too much and came back to Swansea University to start studying medicine. Her first year back in Wales she sea swam every single week through the year, furthermore every weekend had to involve finding some wild water swimming spot. Frances has always embraced cold water swimming but a relapse of Hodgkins Lymphoma diagnosed in February 2019 has made Frances realise just how integral the sea is to her life. She is having to take 2 years off medical training and contemplating the adventures that lie ahead. Certainly completing surf instructor is one such adventure, feeling the need to share the joys of the sea with others who are also struggling with health. In August Frances will be going through a stem cell transplant, all finished by September when her central line can be removed and she will be able to get back in the sea! Just in time for the Autumn swells!
Lucille Colin de Verdière (France, living in Oxford, England)
Laura Collister (London, England)
Jean Comer (Alameda, California, US) is a world traveler, mother of 5 daughters, a lifelong reader with a doctorate in adult education. She does not surf. She has lived a full long life, done many kinds of jobs, seen The Ring too many times to count. These days Jean finds joy in being with grandkids and a big intergenerational family, talking politics and sports, and as ever, seeing the world. In the last several months she sailed aboard the QE II on a culture tour, and, with her brother, sought the elusive Northern Lights. When all else fails and nothing cooperates, Jean goes to the movie.
Jean is very much the mother of Krista Comer, the Institute director. She asks your (and especially Krista’s!) indulgence when she brags about her daughter.
Krista Comer (Houston, Gulf Coast, Texas, US)
Krista is the Institute’s Director, a Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA. Krista has four sisters and was raised mainly in California. She was educated in the US northeast, and has been living with her family in Houston, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, for the last twenty years. Her sisters and mother live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Krista came in to the Institute project by working with all kinds of women surfers, some of whom read her book Surfer Girls in the New World Order. The process of doing these Institutes, and trying to explain what “Public Humanities” is, as a form of activist community-based research and action, has helped her to refocus what is important to her personally as a feminist researcher. Being with the Institute women has also given her a chance to be in the water more, not so much as a surfer, but as a kayaker, novice SUP who falls in a lot, and otherwise, a waterwoman balancing lives of the mind and the body . . .
In the last couple of years, the Institute has expanded its focus in international directions because issues in women’s surfing are tied to geographical political and ocean contexts. In 2017, Krista came to know Lyndsey Stoodley who presented her work on the Global Surf Reserves in California at the IWS training at Stanford University. Lyndsey introduced many of us in the US to Surf Senoiritas, and to Dani Robertson. The idea of an Institute Europe, with Wales as its headquarters, was hatched! Check out IWS Europe’s Research Report 2018. In 2019, in collaboration with Dr. lisahunter of Monash University, the Institute Oceania came to life through joint efforts of lisahunter and Krista Comer. This beautiful video indicates the range of issues presented by participants from Australia, Vanuatu, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the US, and Wales.
This Institute Europe 2019 is very special for Krista because her mum, Jean Comer, will be a special guest. Institute participants are in for a treat in meeting this smart, funny, and worldly woman. Values of intergenerational connection are fully in practice!!
For more about Krista’s work, teaching, and writing, see kristacomer.rice.edu.
Yvette Curtis (Croyde, England)
Lorna Evans (Devon, England)
Lucie Groves (Manorbier, Wales)
Sophie Hellyer (London, Ireland) is a writer, surfer and yoga teacher who divides her time between the Atlantic coast of Ireland and London. She’s also a cold water swimmer, environmentalist, feminist, producer, model and public speaker.
Sophie grew up in Devon and became a champion surfer at national level. As her career progressed she became determined to foster a more diverse and inclusive surfing culture; she co-created the movement #RiseFierce which inspires women to try cold-water swimming, promoting body-positivity and improving mental and physical health; she qualified as a yoga teacher and began hosting women’s retreats; she became a prominent voice on matters of ocean pollution, plastic waste, sustainable fashion and eco-friendly living.
Sophie has worked for and with various clients: her writing has been published in national publications ranging from The Independent to Surf Girl magazine, and she has modelled and produced for major brands such as Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger and Toyota. In 2018 she was invited to give a TEDx talk in the Netherlands on ocean pollution.
Sophie has a committed and highly-engaged social media following and wherever possible, she hopes to enlighten her audience and promote meaningful change.
Elsa Hammond (Abingdon, England)
Elsa Hammond (Oxford) is an award-winning travel writer (co-author, The Wild Guide to Southern and Eastern England, UK Travel Media Awards Travel Guide of the Year 2015) and a poet, whose work focuses particularly on solitude in the natural world. In 2014 she undertook a 1,000 mile solo rowing expedition on the Pacific Ocean (undertaking some citizen science sampling of microplastics along the way), and is now completing a collection exploring the experience of spending almost two months alone on the open ocean.
Elsa is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and recently completed her PhD on breath, voice and the culture of air in the work of Coleridge and Tennyson, at the University of Bristol. She also works as a Clinical Teaching Associate at Oxford, focusing on women’s health, treating patients with respect, and language and communication in clinical settings. She co-organises SciPo2019, an interdisciplinary network exploring the creative common ground between poetry and science, and recently edited SciPo’s inaugural poetry collection (Haunted by Cycles of Return: Poems about Climate Change).
Elsa grew up by the sea in Italy, and misses living near it – she swims in rivers, lakes and the sea as much as she can throughout the year. She loves surfing, although she is very much a beginner, and hopes to be able to find other people to go with sometime, as she doesn’t really know anyone who surfs. She is working towards qualifying as a Mountain Leader, and is also in the early stages of co-authoring a book about water, with two fellow river swimmers.
Past engagements include: BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, TEDx Bath, the Stanford Travel Writers Festival, the Hay Literary Festival, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution.
Cory Hughes (Llanell, Wales) is an award-winning strategist and digital leader, working globally across sectors. Her work pivots around technology and building a better world. She is the managing director of Storywave, a creative consultancy using narrative and systems-based thinking to transform progressive organisations. Her clients include the United Nations, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the British Council and The Wildlife Trusts.
Cory read English Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating in 2007. She began her career in publishing as an editor and, post-arrival of the Kindle, as digital lead for Scholastic UK, the world’s largest publisher of children’s books. Following IWS (Europe) in 2018, she made an experimental return to publishing by co-founding Daughters of the Sea with fellow Institute for Women Surfers colleague, Laura Truelove. Daughters of the Sea is a print and online platform lifting women to the surface of cold-water surf culture. Our content is heavily inspired by the water-women of Wales.
Passionate about the watery parts of the world, Cory is an avid surfer, outdoor swimmer and sea-kayaker. She can be found surfing at her home break in Llangennith, Wales come hail, rain or shine.
Elen Jones (Cold Inn, Wales)
Elen is a chemical engineer specialising in process safety. She has worked at an Oil Refinery since graduating in 2004. Elen lucked out and lives and works in Pembrokeshire and spends her free non ‘mum’ time (which is currently scarce) surfing. Elen’s industry is predominantly male and she has participated in a number of initiatives to encourage more young women into STEM industries. Elen sees parallels between a lack of women in STEM industries and a lack of women in the line up and is exploring ways of getting more women into the water locally. Elen has a 4 year old girl and an 8 week old boy. Her favourite thing to do as family is hang out at the beach.
Loren Leaver (Worthing, England)
Charlotte Lloyd-Byrd (Pembroke Dock, Wales)
Emily Marsay (Newquay, England) is a PhD student at the University of Exeter, and a part-time teacher with charity ‘The Brilliant club’. Through this charity she teaches secondary school children from low-income backgrounds about politics. She grew up near Birmingham but is currently based in Devon, South West England.
Emily’s PhD research looks at approaches to women’s empowerment, especially the conflict between paid and unpaid work and how this interacts with empowerment initiatives in developing countries. Emily completed her degree ‘BSc Economics and Politics with Advanced Proficiency in German’ in 2017, with her third year spent at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She has also worked as a teacher of English as a foreign language with the British Council in Thailand, and worked in surf camps in Muizenberg, South Africa and El Cotillo, Fuerteventura.
Emily used to be the co-director of Environmental NGO ‘The UK Youth Climate Coalition’, for whom she volunteered for five years. She organised UK campaigns and was part of an annual youth delegation to the UN Climate change negotiations. She has been involved in environmental activism from a young age but currently is taking a bit of a break from frontline protests. Now Emily spends her spare time surfing, dog-walking and learning Spanish. She likes to raise money for charities through wacky events every year such as shaving her head or competing in charity boxing matches! Emily is moving to Newquay to continue with her PhD by sea in a couple of days and is very excited.
Lára McManus (Brighton, England)
Rebecca Olive (Queensland, Australia). Joining us remotely from . . .
Helen O’Rourke (Preston, England)
Dani Robertson (Ynys Môn, Wales) Founder, Surf Senioritas, Co-Founder, Institute for Women Surfers Europe (Wales)
Dani Robertson is the founder of online surf community ‘Surf Senioritas’. With Lyndsey Stoodley and Krista Comer, she is co-founding the Institute for Women Surfers Europe, headquartered in Wales. The aim of Surf Senioritas and of the Institute Europe communities is to create and strengthen a supportive network of activist women around the world. We encourage women of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to join to empower each other to enjoy and care for our oceans, and advocate for ourselves.
Dani grew up on Ynys Môn, an island in North Wales and was schooled throughout in Welsh. She studied music at the University of Glamorgan. She has a strong background in social and community projects, working for ten years in the South Wales Valleys to support people in deprived areas. Dani was recently elected as a community councillor for Plaid Cymru and qualified as a SUP instructor after moving to Shropshire to live with her military partner. Dani is a Welsh speaker.
Sarah Ryan (London, England) For the best part of 10 years Sarah’s been working predominantly in healthcare construction as a Project Manager and moonlighting as a web and mobile developer. Now committing to the latter full time she’s currently working on a marine forecasting application that’s building local information into existing wind and swell models and looking at how to create a more intuitive and accessible interface.
Previous to this and despite the lack of an engineering degree (she’s a History graduate), she was working for Mace Group managing engineering and construction projects at University College London Hospital and the Natural History Museum. While presenting some interesting challenges, it was keeping her from what she really wanted to do and how she wanted to live. As a result, she’s now making websites and apps for other businesses and in the process of developing one of her key ambition’s- an application that seeks to have local knowledge built into surf forecasts with a better design.
Sarah grew up in the United Arab Emirates in Ajman and Sharjah and came to the UK for University. While always having a love of the ocean, she came into surfing later on after popping up on a very buoyant foamie and thought it was one of the best feelings.
Lyndsey Stoodley (Cardiff, Wales) Lyndsey is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University (UK), where her research is focused on the evaluation of World Surfing Reserves, and the evolution of surfing as a social movement. She started surfing in Wales over 12 years ago and has travelled, worked and surfed all over the world since. Graduating in 2010 with a BScEcon in International Relations from Aberystwyth University, Lyndsey then went to work in Berlin, Australia and China before returning to academia in 2014 to study Sustainability, Planning and Environmental Policy at Cardiff; her masters thesis looked at surfers’ perceptions of artificial waves and marked the start of a surf centred academic career.
Lyndsey undertook an international collaboration scoping trip in 2017 which led her to surf towns in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the US. She was able to attend the 2017 Institute in California, which proved to be a wonderful experience, and something which she felt would work well in Wales. She reached out to Dani Robertson at Surf Senioritas to co-found the European Institute with Krista Comer, and was delighted that it was possible to launch the first IWS chapter outside of the US in July 2018.
Lyndsey used to enjoy surfing small waves on big boards, but now, inspired by the women of the California Institute, she has ditched the board and practices bodysurfing which she believes is the best thing ever.
Frances Simmons (Swansea, Wales)
Clare Thornton (Westbury Wiltshire, England)
Laura Truelove (Cardiff, Wales) is a Welsh writer, surfer and ocean advocate. She’s based in South Wales, and divides her time between Cardiff Bay and the Gower’s shoreline. Laura is currently working on her book Thalassophile; a year long diary which details her own experience in, on and by the sea, 365 days of the year. She is also the Cofounder of a zine (mini magazine), Daughters of the Sea, which was developed following last year’s IWS event, where she met her partner in prime, Cory Hughes. After questioning the misrepresentation (or lack of representation) of women surfers in the media, they decided to create Daughters of the Sea; a project entirely dedicated to cold water women.
Laura’s passion for ocean advocacy naturally led her to become a Regional Representative for the marine conservation charity, Surfers Against Sewage. Through this work, she successfully ran a volunteer-led campaign to make Aberystwyth the first certified #PlasticFree town in the UK. Her beach cleaning efforts were recently featured on one of the UK’s most popular nature programmes, BBC Countryfile.
Ellie Wainwright (Saundersfoot, Wales)
Kristen Yonan (Capistrano Beach, California)