Our Board, Staff and Advisory Board

Meet the BIPOC Farming Initiatives Director

Tia Stuart serves as the BIPOC Farming Initiatives Director at the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, where she leads programs such as the Regenerative Farmer Fellowship. With more than 25 years of experience in growing, preserving, and teaching practical uses for locally grown produce, she brings deep practical knowledge to her work.  Tia is passionate about sharing these essential, life-sustaining skills with others to strengthen community resilience and food sovereignty.

Meet the Artist-in-Residence

Love’Yah Stewart is a Dayton-based agricultural photographer, urban farmer, and the founder of THKLUVLTR Photography and The Lavender Project—an agriCULTURE movement rooted in storytelling, land, and legacy.

With nearly a decade behind the lens, Love’Yah documents the quiet, powerful relationships between people and the land—centering Black, queer, and underrepresented voices in agriculture. Her work lives at the intersection of art, food systems, and cultural memory, using photography as both archive and offering.

As the 2026 Artist-in-Residence, Love’Yah is focused on capturing the rhythms of farm life while inviting the public into deeper connection through guided photography walks, seed-centered gatherings, and immersive storytelling experiences. Her work asks a simple but urgent question: Who gets remembered in agriculture—and how do we preserve what matters before it disappears?

Through The Lavender Project, she continues to build a living archive where seeds carry memory, and images become evidence of care, resilience, and belonging.

Meet the Programs Director and Administration Manager

Florentina Rodriguez, MHSA, Ed.D.

Florentina is a CHamoru seed educator, seed librarian, and founder of The Miami Valley Seed Commons. She has been volunteering or working at Agraria in some capacity since 2018. She has 20+ years of experience in community organizing, outreach, grassroots policy & advocacy, equity & justice work, program development, and nonprofit leadership. She earned her BHSA and MHSA in Human Services Administration and a Doctorate in Environmental and Sustainability Education through Antioch University. She is the co-author of the Culturally-Informed Community Seed (CICS) Pledge which can be found at https://cicspledge.org

Meet our Antioch Miller Fellow

Ethan Adkins is our Miller Fellow from Antioch College studying culture power and change.  He comes from Springfield Ohio and graduated from Clark State College as a TRIO alumni with his associates of arts focusing on clinical sociology.  Currently while working with us at Agraria he has been focusing on concepts like food sovereignty, climate collapse and community connections from the soil up.  He runs the compost facility and builds hügelkultur beds on the farm.