Brendan Brown

I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh surrounded by water and battered by wind, but without a kite in sight. Basketball, baseball, lacrosse, and hockey were my athletic outlets growing up, but after moving to New Hampshire for boarding school, I got hooked on outdoor sports. This transition, combined with summers of my youth sailing and kayaking up and down the east coast of the United States, kiting seemed like the natural progression when I got to college.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take advantage of my university’s kiteboarding club, flanking snowkiting on frozen lakes with late fall and early spring sessions in a drysuit for the first several years. Despite my best efforts to stay distracted by kiting, whitewater kayaking, mountain biking, and ice climbing during college, I managed to graduate with a B.S. in International Agriculture & Rural Development.

Along the way, I satisfied my travel bug with extended research trips to Uganda, Nicaragua, Gabon, and Ethiopia. My own experience investigating land tenure and the intersection of agricultural production and natural resource management through ethnographic methods gets me really excited about the opportunities that we’ll have as a school to contextualize our studies within such incredible locales.

After graduating, I finally made the long-awaited move to the Columbia River Gorge where I could more thoroughly pursue my recreational interests. Since then, I’ve been working summers at a local kite shop and in the public school systems in the area as a full-time substitute teacher during the school year. I’m delighted to be blending my passions together and to have the opportunity to learn and grow holistically with our students!