Zoë Balestri

Zoë Balestri is a Brown ‘22 undergraduate activist, writer, farmer, and filmmaker, studying Literary Arts and developing an Independent Concentration in Agricultural Humanities. An aspiring screenwriter, she is the Head of Production for Brown Motion Pictures. In 2020, she was awarded the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial for the best poem by an undergraduate or graduate student. Zoë became an activist for reproductive rights in high school when she designed and modeled a dress she fashioned from condoms and Planned Parenthood stickers, garnering accolades from Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue as well as the attention of Breitbart. A city-dwelling Manhattanite, she has worked summers since age nine on a third-generation, women-run dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania where she learned about heifer midwifery and pasture rotations and developed her passion for animal husbandry, sustainable agriculture, and the workforce that sustains its increasingly fragile way of life. Through her writing, farm work, and studies, she examines how policy, politics, and culture can repair both rural communities and humanity’s ethically fraught relationships to animals and the earth.