Founder & CEO

Manda Kalimian

Manda Kalimian is the founder and president of the CANA Foundation, which for over a decade ago has worked to rewild America’s wild horses and land to promote environmental and climate sustainability. Through CANA, Manda has not only raised awareness of issues surrounding America’s wild horses and environmental destruction, she’s also led major change in Washington, including the effectuation of rewilding language for managing America’s wild horses in the FY2020 Interior Appropriations budget bill. A frequent speaker, she’s presented about horse and environmental topics at Cambridge University at the Cambridge Conservation Forum in England. She’s appeared in leading media, including on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Through her production company, White Feather Productions, she’s spearheaded music videos, TV spots, Times Square Billboards and live events to share the message about wild horses globally. She also founded a wellness line of skincare products, Naturally Considerate, whose profits go back to equestrian and environmental causes. Manda is also a founding member of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell, a nonpartisan institute that seeks to elevate the discourse and deepen understanding of volatile political and global events.

On her private farm on Long Island, she works with animal rescues ranging from horses to goats and welcomes visitors to learn through special workshops and exclusive events at her Rewilding Space. Manda is a passionate advocate for preserving the Native American culture and supports educational and health initiatives benefiting indigenous communities.

Acting Executive Director and CFO

Jacqueline Kapur

Jackie is a founding partner at Ignition Capital and a former divisional CFO at a multi-billion-dollar, privately-held global firm based in New York. Through her 15-year corporate finance career, Jackie has a proven track record of formulating and executing strategies & budgets for both start-ups and established businesses. She is a thoughtful and experienced leader in finance, business development, operation, marketing, and HR across industries including information technology, news, research, data, financial services, and consumer products. Excellent communication and people skills with significant experience navigating C-level management through major strategic changes.

Science Advisor | Board Member

Dr. Ross MacPhee

Ross MacPhee Ph.D., is CANA’s scientific advisor and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Ross is a biologist specializing in mammals that are now extinct, especially those that lived in recent prehistory (last 2 million years). He has searched for recently-lost species all over the world, seeking to explain not only their biological relationships but why they died out. Using both fossils and modern genomic methods, he and his colleagues are seeking to show that all modern horses, whether domestic or wild, have ancestries that ultimately originated in North America. He was curator of the AMNH exhibition The Horse (2008) and the author of End of the Megafauna (Norton, 2019), an account of species disappearances worldwide after the end of the last Ice Age–– including the mysterious loss of the horse in North America.

American Indian Liaison

Moses Brings Plenty

Mo Brings Plenty is an enrolled Lakota who hails from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. His traditional name — given to him as a young boy — is Ta Sunke Wospapi (“catches his horse”); it befits a man who spends more time on his horses than anywhere else. As a Lakota, Moses works through a vision of the future of tribal America to share best practices and cultural understanding with CANA and CANA constituents, advocating for the importance of the horse nation as an important part of our culture and environment. 

Legislative Advisor

Steve Israel

Steve Israel was a Member of Congress for sixteen years and currently serves as CANA Foundation’s legislative advisor. He also heads the non-partisan Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs in New York City. A regular political commentator on MSNBC, Steve appears regularly in The New York Times, The Atlantic Magazine, as well as The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. He wrote the popular books “Big Guns” & “The Global War On Morris” and is a regular at horse shows and events with his children and grandchildren, as well as being a horse lover and advocate.

Rob Pero Perodigm

A member of the Bad River Tribe, Rob is committed to honoring his Indigenous heritage and Ojibwe roots. Rob values family, support for community, respect for the natural world and a commitment to doing everything “in a good way”. Rob Pero’s production career began in 2011 with a documentary entitled Bad Indian, a self-reflective journey into rediscovering his own roots. This ongoing production has instilled in him the value of being an indigenous filmmaker as well as exposed new opportunities to raise up authentic voices, stories, and issues. Since then, Rob has produced and directed over 200 credits ranging from nonprofit to corporate to creative, most recently with the award-winning and internationally recognized Our State. Their Lives. Your Call. which began development in 2019 and released in 2020.

Research and Strategic Planning

Thomas Christensen

A first generation New Yorker, Thomas Christensen works as a consultant for Cana. His devotion to helping Nature thrive started in King County, Washington State, where he restored native habitat for salmon, rivers, eagles and evergreen trees. He formally began his higher education on environmental policy in London, where he published for the Global Bioenergy Change, Global Transitions and Energies journals. He is now based in Los Angeles where he continues to collaborate with the UK in the field of climate diplomacy for the British Embassy Network, helping different countries, cultures and people connect on shared issues of biodiversity, renewable energy and the just transition. He has hiked all of Maine on the Appalachian Trail, accompanied in spirit by Kateri Tekakwitha, and enjoys cooking for his family and friends.

Finance and Education

Jeanne Budd

Executive Chairman

Cello

Every organization has a boss above the boss. Cello lives at the Rewilding Headquarters on Long Island and constantly reminds everyone what they need to be doing.

Attorney and Native Policy and Relations

Samantha Skenandore

Science Advisor | Board Member

Dr. Ross MacPhee

Ross MacPhee Ph.D., is CANA’s scientific advisor and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Ross is a biologist specializing in mammals that are now extinct, especially those that lived in recent prehistory (last 2 million years). He has searched for recently-lost species all over the world, seeking to explain not only their biological relationships but why they died out. Using both fossils and modern genomic methods, he and his colleagues are seeking to show that all modern horses, whether domestic or wild, have ancestries that ultimately originated in North America. He was curator of the AMNH exhibition The Horse (2008) and the author of End of the Megafauna (Norton, 2019), an account of species disappearances worldwide after the end of the last Ice Age–– including the mysterious loss of the horse in North America.

Professor of Anthropology and Biochemistry McMaster University. Cana Science Advisory Board

Dr. Henrik Poinar

Co-Founder, Rewilding Europe Program Manager, GRAZELIFE

Wouter Helmer

Wouter Helmer is the co-founder of Rewilding Europe and Programme Manager of GRAZELIFE, a project at the request of the European Commission to come up with recommendations for effective grazing systems regarding climate adaptation, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services. He brings to CANA’s Science Advisory Board over 30 years of experience with rewilding projects on this continent.

Archeological scientist specializing in ancient DNA Cana Science Advisory Board

Dr. Tyler Murchie

Dr. Tyler Murchie is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the McMaster University Ancient DNA Centre in Hamilton, Canada with Professor Hendrik Poinar, with whom Tyler did his Ph.D. research on ancient environmental DNA recovered from the Yukon Territory. Tyler has been developing new techniques for recovering and utilizing sedimentary ancient DNA from permafrost and lake sediments to understand the environmental turnover and mass extinction of ice-age megafauna such as woolly mammoth, horse, and steppe bison during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (11,700 years ago). Through the techniques Tyler has developed, a new scale of environmental DNA resolution has been made possible, wherein the simultaneous transition of plants and animals can be observed solely through the molecular remnants those organisms left behind on ancient landscapes. Moreover, Tyler’s work has hinted at the late survival of ice age horses and mammoths in the Yukon thousands of years after their last dated fossil remains, and highlights the potential to recover genomic-scale information from many diverse organisms simultaneously, solely through environmental DNA preserved for millennia in sediments and soils.

Tyler has also been working on various other archaeological applications of environmental DNA aimed towards understanding human-ecological interactions in deep time. Beyond ice age environmental DNA, Tyler has contributed to published research on the population history of ancient Romans with palaeogenomics and stable isotopes, as well as northern plains archaeology with ancient DNA and projectile point systematics during his masters and B.Sc. (hons) degrees at the University of Calgary.

Cultural Liaison / Photographer​

Karla R. LaRive

Karla R. LaRive is a long-time advocate for preserving the legacy of wild horses and the vanishing American West. She comes to CANA Foundation with a background in photography, communications and marketing. In 2006, Karla formed her production company, PK Productions, LLC with a focus in media and music production and cultural awareness. As producer, Karla was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Regional Roots Album “Generations” in 2015. She served 10 years as Communications Director for the Institute of Range and American Mustang, working alongside wild horse conservation pioneer, the late Dayton O. Hyde, at his 11,000 acre wild horse sanctuary in western South Dakota. Karla is an advocate in Government and Tribal relations on behalf of wild horses in South Dakota and around the country.

Founder—Wild Horse Education

Laura Leigh

Laura Leigh has joined the board of CANA in an advisory capacity. Laura has a deep understanding of the law and over a decade of on-the-ground experience on public lands. Her work includes the only cases in history against abuse during capture of wild horses. One of her First Amendment court rulings, to open the world of wild horses to public scrutiny, is now used to protect civil rights nationwide. Her work on the range, and in the courtroom, has been featured in several books and countless news features. Laura’s experience blends well with CANAs mission to protect wild places and wild horses through the concepts of rewilding.

Wild Horse Liaison

Judy Fuson

Judy advises CANA Foundation on wild horse behaviors and is a gifted teacher, author, and horse trainer with over twenty years of experience in “talking with animals.” She works with pet owners on behavior problems, illness, and unsoundness in dogs, cats, horses, and other animals. She is the author of “Wagging Tails, Swishing Tails, Fluffy Tails, and Other Tales,” a book about animal communication. A lecturer at Whole Life Expos, Victory of Light Expo in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Universal Light Expo in Columbus, Ohio, she has also been a presenter at Equine Affair in Columbus, Ohio. Popular in the media, she’s been a guest on radio shows including Transitions Radio Magazine in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and currently appears with Jill Reynolds on Critter Chatter in Boulder, Colorado.

Federal Agency Consultant

Gayle Hunt

Originally from rural Western Oregon, Gayle has spent the last 30 years in Central Oregon––a world apart. The desert and pine forest ecosystems of the drier climes east of the Cascades were the logical landscape for a career in the U.S. Forest Service and a commitment to the preservation of America’s wild horses and burros.  

As witness to the weak approach of Federal Agencies to the management of wild equines, Gayle founded the Central Oregon Wild Horse Coalition to consolidate the random interests of area citizens into a more formidable, solution-based advocacy front. Particular areas of emphasis, in addition to protection of the Forest Service-managed Big Summit herd, are the Native Species status of the Horse in North America; the potential contributions of equines to the restoration of Western rangelands; the strengthening of legal protections of wild equines and universal adherence to those protections; and the creation of partnerships with Veterans and underserved communities to accomplish on-range work which keeps wild herds intact on their homelands.

Workforce Policy / Wild Horse Advisor

Elise Lowe-Vaughn

Elise Lowe-Vaughn serves as the CANA Workforce Policy Advisor. In her day job she is the Colorado Director of Workforce Programs and oversees a large portfolio of federal and state workforce programs. She is an appointed member to several national workforce associations and serves on several state and county boards. Elise has testified before a Congressional subcommittee and presented internationally on challenges facing the future workforce. She uses her knowledge of western issues facing communities, and her expertise in policy and legislation to promote an integrated wild horse advocacy strategy for our wild horses and their legally designated lands with a goal of ecological balance so all can thrive. Her two horses continue to be her teachers and guides.

Advisor

Darrell Marcus Kills In Sight