Kimiko Barrett

Sr. Wildfire Researcher & Policy Analyst, Headwaters Economics

Kimiko Barrett is the Senior Wildfire Research and Policy Analyst at Headwaters Economics, a non-partisan independent research organization based in Bozeman, Montana. Kimi is a committed agent of change in how we live with inevitable wildfires. In partnering with institutions, community leaders, local government, federal policy makers, and other subject matter experts, she has led research of national significance on topical issues such as the economics of wildfires, structural ignition vulnerabilities, building codes and land use planning, and community risk reduction strategies. Kimi served on the Federal Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, providing key Congressional policy recommendations to better address wildfire impacts. She also is the previous Program Director for Headwaters Economics’ Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire (CPAW) program, working with more than 80 communities across the country to devise community-driven solutions to reduce and adapt to increasing wildfire risks. Born and raised in Bozeman, Montana, she now lives in nearby Livingston and has her Ph.D. in Forestry.

Barry Beach

Keynote Speaker

Barry Beach was born in 1962 on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and raised in Poplar, Montana, where he graduated from Poplar High School. He later studied at Lee Bible College and Emmaus Bible College, and completed construction training through Florida State University’s CCER program.

In 1984, Beach was convicted of the 1979 murder of Poplar class valedictorian Kimberly Nees and sentenced to 100 years without parole. His confession, which he later said was coerced, was the central piece of evidence against him. Over the decades, his case drew national attention, including a 2008 Dateline NBC investigation and support from Centurion Ministries, highlighting questions about the evidence and the reliability of his confession. After multiple appeals and legislative changes to Montana’s clemency laws, Gov. Steve Bullock commuted Beach’s sentence in 2015, leading to his release after more than three decades in prison. He now lives in Billings, where he owns and operates a handyman business and frequently shares his story with colleges, churches and civic groups to shed light on the justice system.

Claire Bernard

Student Journalist, Freelance Journalist

Claire Bernard is a Montana-based freelance writer, reporter and student at the University of Montana in Missoula. After joining UM’s student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin, as a news reporter her freshman year, Claire started reporting on higher education, eventually becoming news editor and editor-in-chief of the Kaimin. In her time with the Kaimin, Claire reported on academic restructures, campus crime and the impact of state & national politics on higher ed Claire has freelanced for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle covering local events, interned with The Pulp reporting on homelessness in Missoula and joined the Seattle Times as a business reporting intern. Claire traveled with the University of Montana’s journalism program to Bangladesh to report on climate change and Scotland for healthcare reporting.

Ryan Callaghan

VP of Conservation, MeatEater Inc.

Ryan “Cal” Callaghan champions sustainable outdoor business and recreation. As outdoor clothing brand First Lite’s inaugural employee, he built its conservation ethos and identity. Ryan promotes responsible land use, stewardship and conservation based business practice. He chairs the North American Board for Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, is a former guide and lifelong outdoorsman, he hosts the “Cal of the Wild” podcast, advocating for public lands, responsible hunting, and stewardship. Cal works from his home state of Montana.

Chris Dorrington

Director, Montana Department of Transportation

Chris Dorrington now serves as the Director of the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), appointed by Governor Gianforte in June 2024. To fulfill MDT’s mission, Director Dorrington is focused on organizational excellence, clear and consistent communication, and accountability. He is actively advancing efficiencies and effectiveness of MDT programs while honoring our most valuable assets – our people. In July 2022 Governor Gianforte also appointed Director Dorrington as the Chair of the Housing Task Force, with an objective of quickly researching and then proposing improvements that both the Montana Legislature, Executive branch and locals could implement to address Montana’s housing crisis. Prior to his current role as MDT Director, he led the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) as Director for 3.5 years, and the Air, Energy, and Mining Division at DEQ for 4.5 years prior. He started his state career at MDT, working for 10.5 years in the Planning Division. In total, Director Dorrington has nearly 19 years in leadership with the state and six in private industry. He earned his Bachelor’s of Science in mechanical engineering from Gonzaga University, and a master’s degree in transportation policy, operations and logistics from George Mason University.

Mary Erickson

Forest Supervisor, Custer Gallatin National Forest (Retired)

Mary Erickson enjoyed a 40-year career in public service and public land management with the U.S. Forest Service, working across the western U.S. as a planner, district ranger, and supervisor on two national forests. She served as chair of the Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Committee during the development of the 2016 conservation strategy, as lead partner for the Interagency Bison Management Plan, and as chair of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee. After 16 years as supervisor of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, Erickson retired in December 2023 and now serves on the boards of directors of the Wildlife Restoration Foundation and the Montana Conservation Corps.

David Folkenflik

Media Correspondent, NPR News

Keynote Speaker

Based in New York City, David Folkenflik serves as NPR’s media correspondent. His stories and analyses are broadcast on the network’s newsmagazines, including All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Here & Now. Folkenflik brought listeners the profile of a Las Vegas columnist who went bankrupt fending off a libel lawsuit from his newspaper’s new owner; conducted the first interview with New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet after his appointment; and repeatedly broke news involving the troubled Tronc company, which owns some of the most important regional newspapers in the country. Folkenflik joined NPR in 2004 after more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun, where he covered higher education, national politics, and the media. A five-time winner of the Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism from the National Press Club, Folkenflik has also received numerous other recognitions, including the inaugural 2002 Mongerson Award for Investigative Reporting on the News and top honors from the National Headliners Awards.

Amanda Fulton

Editor in Chief, MSU Exponent 

Amanda Fulton is a senior at Montana State University in Bozeman. Originally from Amherst, New Hampshire, she is pursuing degrees in global studies and English writing with a minor in English literature and plans to graduate in the spring of 2026. She has been involved with the campus student newspaper, the MSU Exponent, for the entirety of her college career, and is currently the editor-in-chief. Amanda is a 2022 Presidential Scholar of the MSU Honors College and a recipient of the MSU Presidential Scholarship, the university’s most prestigious award, recognizing students who demonstrate exceptional academic achievement, leadership and public service. Throughout her time at MSU, she has received multiple scholarships for service and leadership, academic success and creative writing. 

Amy Gamerman

Journalist and Author of “The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West”

Amy Gamerman is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section. Previously, she was the newspaper’s drama critic and a staff writer on the Leisure & Arts page.

Her work has been recognized with multiple awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Redbook, and Departures. She attended Yale University and King’s College, Cambridge. Gamerman lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and editor Kevin Conley, and their four children. “The Crazies” is her first book.

Malena Gangi

President and Editor, Charles M. Russell High School Newspaper

A senior at Charles M. Russell High School, Malena Gangi currently serves as president and editor of the student newspaper and is a journalism intern with the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce. She focuses on local reporting, features, and photojournalism, and helped revive her school paper after its discontinuation. Gangi’s work has earned state and regional awards, and she was selected for the 2025 Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference in Washington, D.C.

Maritsa Georgiou

Veteran Journalist and Co-host of “Grounded with Jon Tester & Maritsa Georgiou”

Maritsa Georgiou is a political journalist who co-hosts the Grounded Podcast with former Sen. Jon Tester. Previously, she anchored America Tonight on Scripps News, where she also worked as a national correspondent. She’s specialized in COVID-19, politics and wildfire coverage.

She’s most widely known for her reporting on the planned removal of USPS blue collection boxes before the 2020 election, which earned her the 2021 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism. Maritsa is a fierce believer that one person can make a difference and everyone should try.

Jodie Ginsberg

CEO, Committee to Protect Journalists

Keynote Speaker

A journalist by profession, Ginsberg began her career as a graduate trainee with Reuters news agency in South Africa, and subsequently worked as Reuters’ chief correspondent in Ireland, based in Dublin. As bureau chief for Reuters in the U.K. and Ireland, Ginsberg managed coverage of the 2008 financial crisis, U.K. riots, and 2010 general election, as well as overseeing the merger of the Thomson and Reuters U.K. newsrooms.

In 2014, Ginsberg was appointed chief executive of London-based freedom of expression group Index on Censorship, which she led until 2020. From 2020 to 2022 she was chief executive of Internews Europe, a media development nonprofit, and serves on the board of The Trust for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and as a council member of IFEX, the international network for freedom of expression organizations.

Ginsberg now serves as CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the world’s largest press freedom and journalist protection organizations.

Llew Jones

Montana State Representative

Llew Jones is a lifelong Montanan, business owner, and veteran legislator known for building coalitions and putting Montana first. He chairs the House Appropriations and MARA Committees, leading efforts to move Montana from reactive to proactive governance. He authored HB 924 and launched the nationally recognized MARA framework—extending budget planning to 20 years and using data to guide long-term decisions that strengthen Montana’s future.

Maggie McGuane

Writer and Humanitarian

Maggie McGuane was born in Livingston, Montana where she went on to raise her own children, Maisie and Charlie. Maggie wrote for publications like Vogue and the New York Times before discovering, during Hurricane Katrina, a passion for disaster response.

She has used her Montana “get ‘er done” attitude on the ground in hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes assisting in humanitarian aid and animal rescue around the globe.

Thomas McGuane

Acclaimed novelist and short story writer

Thomas McGuane was born in Michigan to a displaced Massachusetts family, and has lived in Montana since 1968. He graduated from Michigan State University, received an MFA from Yale and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has written ten novels, several movies, 3 volumes of short stories and the forthcoming “A Wooded Shore”.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Flyfishing Hall of Fame and the National Cutting Horse Hall of fame. He is father or stepfather of four children and lives in the Boulder valley.

Jami Jarrett Moody

Jami Jarrett Moody was born and raised in Sweet Grass County and is the 6th generation to own and operate the family ranch. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in business management, she moved back to Big Timber to raise her family in 1995. Jami has worked at the Sweet Grass County Attorney’s office for nearly 27 years, as well as working on the ranch in multiple capacities. Jami and her family are woven deep into the fabric of Sweet Grass County, and she is committed to finding creative ways to breathe new life into her small community. She is an active member of several local organizations, including St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Crazy Mountain Collective and Sheepherder Square Foundation. 

Nick Mott

Journalist, Author, and Host of MTPR’s “The Wide Open” podcast

Nick Mott is a multimedia journalist based in Livingston, Montana who focuses on the environment, wildlife, climate, and public lands. His reporting has been in the New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition, The Washington Post, Outside, High Country News, and PRI’s The World, among other outlets.

He hosted and created the podcast The Wide Open, from MTPR and the Montana Media Lab. Together, his podcast productions won a Peabody and two national Edward R. Murrow awards, been named one of the best podcasts of the year by the New Yorker, breached the iTunes Top Ten charts multiple times and received praise in publications all across the country. When he’s not reporting, he’s usually stumbling his way up a mountain somewhere.

He released his first book, with co-author Justin Angle, in 2023. In 2024, his podcast—The Wide Open Season One: Threatened—premiered. The show, a collaboration between Montana Public Radio and the Montana Media Lab, is about what the Endangered Species Act can teach us about living with wildlife and living with each other.

Joseph T. O’Connor

Managing Editor – Mountain Journal

Joe O’Connor is Managing Editor for Mountain Journal, a nonprofit, digital journalism outlet covering the wildlife, wildlands and environmental issues in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  

Joe previously served for 10 years as Editor-in-Chief for Mountain Outlaw magazine and the Explore Big Sky newspaper in Big Sky, Montana. His work has appeared in publications from the East Coast to California, including Newsweek, CNN and Skiing magazine, among others. He moved to Montana in 2012 after studying journalism at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ryan Osmundson

Director of Budget and Program Planning, Montana Office of the Governor

Ryan Osmundson is a Montana politician and farmer. He grew up on a farm in Iowa and moved to Montana in 1997 to attend the Montana Wilderness School of the Bible. Ryan served six years in the Montana House of Representatives and five years in the Montana Senate, where he was chair of the Finance and Claims Committee. Since 2021, he has been the Budget Director for Governor Gianforte. His true passion is farming and ranching, which he does with his wife and ten children near Buffalo, Montana.

Stan Parker

Managing Producer, Impact

Stan Parker leads Impact at Montana PBS, a broadcast series delivering in-depth reporting on issues that matter to Montanans. A Billings native, he joined the station in 2022 after a decade in newsrooms and documentary film. His projects include Banking on Trust (2012), Makoshika (2014), and Return (2023).

Parker’s career has spanned everything from environmental law reporting at Law360 to local news at KTVQ, with plenty of independent film work along the way. He lives in Billings with his wife, Tori, and their son, Nolan.

Marsha Price

Keynote Speaker

Marsha Price was a Paraoptometric Technician for 30 years and subsequently owned and operated an optician business for 20 years. Since retiring, she has devoted much of her time to volunteering with GFWC Billings Junior Woman’s Club, a service group dedicated to community improvement. Price was a founding member of the Barry Beach Free Support Group, which met regularly with invited speakers, held rallies at the courthouse in Billings and Great Falls, and traveled to Helena to talk with legislators, and visited Beach at Montana State Prison. Through her advocacy experience, Price has come to understand that through perseverance and hard work, common, ordinary, people could bring about changes to State laws. Price is an avid traveler, gardener, and loves home improvement projects.

James Rosien

Editor, Anaconda Leader

James S. Rosien is the editor of the Anaconda Leader, a twice-weekly print newspaper covering Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, where he has worked for more than 15 years.

His work in print journalism goes back to the mid-1990s, when he wrote for the youth edition of the Seattle Times. After graduating from college with a degree in English, he wrote and edited sports copy for a company that produced NFL, NHL, and MLB trading cards, and then went on to earn Master of Humanities and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Dallas before moving to Montana.

Nate Schweber

Freelance Journalist

Nate Schweber is a freelance journalist who was born and raised in Missoula, Montana, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Since 2005 his work has appeared regularly in the Metro section of the New York Times. His articles have also appeared in the Guardian, Preservation Magazine, Montana Quarterly, and Anthony Bourdain’s Explore Parts Unknown.

In 2020, a ProPublica series he contributed to won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Schweber attended the University of Montana from 1997 to 2001 and majored in print journalism.

His book “Fly Fishing Yellowstone National Park: An Insider’s Guide to the 50 Best Places” was published in 2012. In 2022, HarperCollins published his next book, “This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild,” which won the High Plains Book Award for nonfiction. 

Jon Tester

Former Montana U.S. Senator

Keynote Speaker

Jon Tester is a third-generation farmer from Big Sandy who represented Montana in the U.S. Senate from 2007 to 2025. Before serving in Washington, D.C.,  he was a member of the Montana Senate, where he served as Senate president during the 2005 session. During his three terms in the U.S. Senate, Tester focused on veterans’ health care, rural infrastructure and government accountability.

Since leaving office in 2025, he has returned to farming and works as a political analyst for MSNBC and co-hosts the podcast “Grounded” with veteran journalist Maritsa Georgiou.

Shawn Thomas

Montana State Forester, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation

Shawn Thomas is the Forestry and Trust Land Division Administrator for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, serving as Montana’s State Forester. He oversees management of Montana’s Trust Lands along with statewide forestry, fire, and land programs.

A University of Montana forestry graduate, Shawn began his career with Plum Creek Timber and Thompson River Lumber before joining DNRC in 2003. Since then, he has held leadership roles in forest management, real estate, and land policy, and now directs the combined Forestry and Trust Land Division. He and his wife, Deana, have been married for over 30 years and live in Montana with their daughter, Danica.

Tim Weiner

Author and Journalist

Keynote Speaker

Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his reporting and writing on American intelligence and national security. His new book, “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century,” was ranked #3 on the New York Times bestseller list upon publication. 

As a reporter at the New York Times from 1993 to 2009, he covered the CIA in Washington, chronicling the struggles of American intelligence from the fall of the Soviet Union to the war on terror. As a foreign correspondent at the Times, he reported on wars, conflicts, and crises in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and many other nations. At the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1992, he covered the fall of Ferdinand Marcos, dictator of the Philippines, and traveled to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation to report on the CIA’s weapons pipeline to Afghan guerrillas. At the Kansas City Times from 1981 to 1982, he was part of a team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the causes of the Hyatt Hotel disaster, the collapse of a newly constructed building that killed 114 people.

Tim is a 1978 graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in history, and a 1979 graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Kate Doyle, an expert on human rights.

Jeff Welsch

Managing Editor, Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Jeff Welsch has been a journalist for 46 years, primarily as a sports writer and editor and later as Montana editor for Lee Newspapers and managing editor for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

In the mid-1980s Welsch was a regional sports correspondent for USA Today/Gannett News Service. From 2008 to 2014, Welsch was communications director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman. For Lee newspapers, Welsch started the 406 MT Sports statewide website. He has also written six books, including “Backroads & Byways of Montana.”

Mary Margaret White

CEO & Executive Director, Mississippi Today

Keynote Speaker

Mary Margaret White is the CEO & Executive Director of Mississippi Today, the state’s flagship nonprofit newsroom whose accountability journalism won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. White has presented the Mississippi Today story and the power of nonprofit news to audiences ranging from local civic groups to the American Journalism Project and the Knight Media Forum. 

A 2021 graduate of the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program at Columbia University and a 2020 Fellow of the Online News Association’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator, White serves as an adviser to the University of Southern Mississippi’s Roy Howard Community Journalism Center and Press Forward Mississippi, as well as the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Mississippi and a master’s degree in Southern studies from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Cathy Whitlock

Regents Professor Emerita of Earth Sciences, Montana State University

Dr. Cathy Whitlock is a Regents Professor Emerita of Earth Sciences at MSU and a Fellow of the Montana Institute on Ecosystems. Her research focuses on long-term environmental change, and she has spent the last 40 years studying the vegetation and fire history of Yellowstone and landscapes around the world.  She has published over 230 scientific papers and is lead author of climate assessments that explain the consequences of climate change in Montana and Greater Yellowstone.