Biography
Katharina (Katya) Mueller is a 26’ Oberlin College and Conservatory graduate hailing from Hartford, Vermont. As an undergraduate, she worked as a student facilitator at the Barefoot Sustained Dialogue program for four years, offering peer-to-peer support especially in the Grief-Centered dialogue, and leading cross-demographic conversations on human land relations in Land-Focused Dialogue, and was a finalist for a 2026 Watson Fellowship in this area. She has returned to the program as the full time Dialogue Coordinator, bringing experience from within and beyond Oberlin in areas of conflict transformation and resolution, facilitation and mediation, education, support in confidential conversation, interpersonal care, and exploring the relationships between humans, humanity, and non-human nature. Katya is also a practicing writer of fiction and non-fiction, a playwright, and a poet. Interests that feed into her creative work include linguistics, rhetoric, and the musicality of language, psychology, queerness, and the physics and chemistry of our world, all as
inroads to conversations around social and environmental justice. She received her BA in Creative Writing, and her BM in Music Composition from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters this past spring. Outside of work, she is an aspiring food forest farmer, and enjoys inordinate reading, playing violin, hiking, camping, cooking from scratch, and befriending stray cats.
