Daniela Molnar

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. She makes pigments from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters—materials that carry the memory of the places they come from—and uses them to make sculptures, paintings, installations, and poems. Her debut book, CHORUS won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure (2025) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Both books grow out of the practices at the heart of this class. Her newest book, Memory of a Larger Mind, written on glaciers in Alaska and the Arctic, will be published in November 2026. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2016 and helped start and run the backcountry artist residency Signal Fire from 2008 to 2023. She lives in Portland, where the forest meets the city.