tree turtle (Cleis Abeni) (she/her)

Co-Director (Co-CEO), Wisdom Projects, Inc.

Director (CEO), Co-Founder, Baltimore Wisdom Project

Note: tree turtle is spelled lowercase. It is Miss turtle's legal first and last names.

Miss tree turtle (Cleis Abeni) co-directs Wisdom Projects, Inc. (WP) and directs the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a division of WP. She is also the current Board President of Wisdom Projects. For over 35 years, Miss turtle has educated youth parents, and families in peace, justice, healing, life science, and the arts. She specializes in the integration of healing practices with STEM and arts education. She is a longtime peacemaker, naturalist, and environmentalist.

She trained extensively in holistic healing rooted in mindfulness across Asia, at locales like the Guangdong Traditional Chinese Medicine School and Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Thailand where she became an ordained Buddhist Upāsikā. 

Miss turtle serves as the Baltimore Wisdom Project's lead program designer, educator, and health navigator. A longtime developer of anti-violence programming for youth and families, she was one of the first holistic health practitioners and educators to introduce high-quality, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, mindfulness, and restorative justice to schools, community centers, recreation centers, and prisons in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

She earned a certificate in trauma-informed care in 1991 from the Armstrong School for Adult Education in Washington, D.C. in one of the first programs of its kind co-sponsored by Associates for Renewal in Education and Providence Hospital. Along with her training in trauma-informed care, she holds certifications in conflict resolution, Tuina and Qigong Healing, Alexander Technique, and Yoga for children. 

Miss turtle began her peacemaking work in the middle 1980s as a US Institute for Peace/DCAC Youth Fellow and a youth facilitator for Ward 4 in a D.C. after-school program sponsored by the Greater Washington D.C. Urban League in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At that time, she was also a youth leader for what was then called the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL).

Miss turtle was mentored by Lee Donald Stern (1915-1992), a Quaker leader in the Alternatives to Violence Project, by Ruth Revels (1936-2016), a Lumbee Elder with whom Miss turtle studied restorative justice practices through talk circles, and by several other key figures that helped shape her vision for peacemaking. Subsequently, across the last 35-plus years, Miss turtle did the following work in peacemaking, community education, and community healing:

• Miss turtle was one of five Program Managers for an anti-violence initiative in Philadelphia called Children’s Behavioral Health Interventions. 
• She was a Mindful Movement Instructor II at the Kennedy Krieger Institute where she helped ensure the fidelity of mindfulness for a research study at a public school. 
• She was the Director of Operations for Baltimore's Inner Harbor Project where she wrote the organization's anti-violence mediation handbook and helped train youth how to apply the work of the handbook within workshops for Baltimore City's law enforcement officers and business leaders in Baltimore's downtown district. 
• She led peacemaking support groups at the Lorton Correctional Complex, Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCIW), and other incarceration facilities.
• She designed and led restorative justice, mindfulness, and STEM centered programs for violence prevention at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, 29th Street Community Center, the Chick Webb Center, Penn North Kids Safe Zone, and many other community centers and recreation centers. 

She was a nurse (a LPN, RN, and a RNP), health navigator, and social worker who worked night shifts at DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, and the Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry while teaching or serving in the nonprofit sector during the day.

She taught life science and language arts for public schools (grades 6-12) while also serving as a part-time School Nurse in Baltimore, Maryland. She worked with the Consortium for Child Welfare and Associates for Renewal in Education under the guidance of the late Brenda Strong Nixon. She also taught for private schools, including as the Edith Hamilton Mentor at Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. As an adjunct professor or a teaching fellow in higher education, she taught at ten colleges and universities in the United States. 

Internationally, she has co-led anti-violence interventions and mediations in West Africa and Southern China on behalf of organizations such as Genders Within and Midwest Holistic.

A longtime grant-writer and fundraiser, she has helped uplift the strategic communications, operations, and fundraising of such nonprofit organizations as the Rev. Vernon Dobson group within BUILD—Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development; the Institute for Survey Research; Sybil Music & Dance; Many Voices; the Bethune Museum and Archives; the Shakespeare Theatre; and the writing center at Goucher College (where she earned an interdisciplinary BA in English, Peace Studies, Philosophy and Religion, and Theater Arts).

A 2001 Pushcart award-winner for best writing published in small presses, Miss turtle is a widely published writer and journalist under her name Cleis Abeni; and a longtime freelance professional editor.

She holds the following advanced degrees: a MA in science writing and poetry from Johns Hopkins University; and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Education, and Dance (with a specialization in mindful movement) from the Ohio State University where her main advisors were Professors Vera Maletic, Odette Blum, and Angelika Gerbes. 

At OSU, under Dr. Maletic's direction, Miss turtle was the first person in the world to notate and analyze two movement forms: (1) The 52 Blocks, an African American martial arts form, and (2) Voguing, an African American and Latina/o LGBT dance tradition. In her movement documentation and analysis, Miss turtle used Labanotation, Motif Description, and Effort-Shape Analysis to document how the dancing embodied different ideas of community and personhood. 

Under Dr. Gerbes' direction, Miss turtle wrote a thesis on the humanist idea of community in the choreography of Doris Humphrey for which Miss turtle received the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars. Miss turtle also researched improvisation in African American vernacular dancing and created an evening-length showcase of structured improvisations featuring multiple Black social dance traditions from the Lindy Hop to BBoy/BGirl.