WRITER & HOST

Jennifer Jewell is a Gardener, writer, and advocate for the cultural power of gardening. Born and raised at 8,000 feet in Colorado, she grew up shaped by plants, place, literature, and the natural world — the daughter of a professional gardener and florist mother and a wildlife biologist father.

Jennifer is the creator and host of Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, the award-winning public radio program and podcast she launched nationally in 2016 after first developing the work through In a North State Garden on North State Public Radio. Through interviews with gardeners, growers, artists, scientists, designers, historians, and culture-makers, her work has long explored gardening as a force that connects people to place, ecology, culture, memory, and one another.

She is the author of The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants, Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast with photographer Caitlin Atkinson, and What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seed. Her work has been recognized by Garden Communicators International, the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, the California Alliance of Independent Booksellers, and the American Horticultural Society, which honored her with the B.Y. Morrison Communication Award.

Through Cultivating Place: The Power of Gardeners, Jennifer’s long-held vision expands from radio and writing into documentary storytelling. Being on the ground with Gardeners across the country has deepened her belief in the resilience, creativity, and possibility held within gardens and in the people who cultivate them. The series gives new form to her life’s work: elevating Gardeners as cultural voices whose care for land, community, and future generations shapes the world we share.

DIRECTOR & CINEMATOGRAPHER

Myriam Nicodemus is a Guatemalan-born documentary filmmaker and photographer based in South Bend, Indiana. Her work is shaped by migration, displacement, and years within military-family life, experiences that inform her interest in belonging, identity, access, and the ways people build stability under conditions of change.

On Cultivating Place: The Power of Gardeners, Myriam serves as director and director of photography, shaping the series through documentary direction, field cinematography, and place-based storytelling. Her work explores gardening as a cultural, ecological, and human practice, connecting people to land, memory, place, and one another. Though not a gardener before beginning the series, the project has deepened her understanding of cultivation as both a relationship to land and a way of seeing people, place, and care.

As the founder of EM EN Production Co. , Myriam leads a South Bend–based production company focused on documentary, cultural, and community-centered storytelling. EM EN began as South Bend’s first public creative studio before evolving into a production company. She later founded AH AH Area Hall Art House, continuing her work in building accessible creative infrastructure for photographers, filmmakers, artists, and production teams.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER

Khoa Huynh brings a background in science, research, and program leadership to the creative team behind Cultivating Place: The Power of Gardeners. As Institute Programs Director at the Harper Cancer Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame, he oversees research initiatives supporting students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and external partners whose work requires collaboration, organization, and a deep curiosity about how complex systems connect.

A double graduate of the University of Notre Dame, with degrees in Biological Sciences and Engineering, Science, and Technology Entrepreneurship, Khoa has built a career at the intersection of research, strategy, and community impact. Before returning to Notre Dame, he helped launch enFocus Inc., a South Bend nonprofit focused on bringing innovation and talent to the region.

As Myriam’s partner and co-founder of EM EN Production Co. , Khoa brings that same steadiness, curiosity, and systems-minded care into their documentary work.