IWM Staff (part-time)
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Karen Clay, Administrative Director
Karen Clay (she/her) is a recent transplant to Northampton moving from the Boston area in 2021. She was drawn to the area’s beauty, culture, and its unique ability to embrace the many ways to be human. Karen has held leadership roles in different non-profit organizations including affordable housing, education, and community organizing. Additionally, she is a master gardener, a lover of Japanese food, and currently lives in co-housing. Working with a spiritual community such as Insight Western Mass (IWM) truly coincides with Karen’s own meditation path and spiritual journey. |
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Bernadine Mellis, IWM Senior Staff; Teacher; White & Awakening in the Dharma Facilitator
Bernadine Mellis believes in the possibility of sangha as a true refuge for all who seek it, and works - through Dhamma-based mediation, facilitation, and teaching - to help manifest that reality. She serves as a teacher and staff member at Insight Western Mass (IWM), where she has been generously nurtured and mentored over many years by members of the Teachers Council, including Jean Esther and Tara Mulay, among others. At IWM, she co-facilitates White & Awakening in the Dharma, the Queer & Trans Affinity Sangha, and Saturday Sangha (for families and everyone), among other offerings. She completed her training as a Community Dharma Leader in 2022 through True North Insight, with deepest gratitude to the beautiful cohort and teaching team: Daryl Lynn Ross, Dawn Mauricio, Jozen Tamori Gibson, and Jill Davey. Bernadine is currently a participant in Sacred Mountain Sangha’s Dharmapala program and a student in Harvard Divinity School’s Buddhist Ministry Initiative, where she studies with Charles Hallisey. |
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Mara Poliak, Outreach and Administrative Coordinator
Mara Poliak is a dancer and artist who practices with human and more-than-human collaborations, and with the body as an uncontainable, collective presence. Alongside their role at IWM, Mara teaches dance, makes performance work, practices qigong, and studies herbalism. They lived on Ohlone land (California Bay Area), for 13 years and worked as a teaching artist at Creativity Explored and NIAD Art Center, both progressive art studios for adult artists with developmental disabilities. Mara was a member of SALTA dance collective, which organized a free monthly mobile performance series in the East Bay and a free yearly interdisciplinary artist residency. They are currently organizing locally with a group of dancers around Palestine solidarity and decolonial work. Mara is an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist Jew committed to a Free Palestine, and committed to art and life practices as inseparable from the world we live in and the worlds we make together. |