Debra Roberts
DEBRA ROBERTS has felt the call of the arts in service to life, all her life. Her work as an artist has taken her to England (for 11 years), N. Ireland, Europe, India, and various North American cities. She has performed with a variety of theater companies, directed, danced, choreographed, edited books, and by invitation, been a member of a sacred Native American performance company in New Mexico.
In 1996, Debra birthed Heron Productions LLC, a multimedia company specializing in documentaries and children’s environmental education productions. She also founded Little Pearls, a non-profit that creates tiny films that open hearts and minds (littlepearls.org), and One Pen, a project in southern India that provides school supplies for girls.
And then in 2005, Debra drove across the country with three quart jars of honey to gift the Banyacya family in Hopi. She wanted to express her thanks for the blessing their father Thomas, who had passed, had been in her life. Somewhere in that magical encounter, something honeybee-ish, full of grace, quietly slipped under her radar and into her life.
After diving passionately into beekeeping in 2006, Debra created The Honeybee Project, a non-profit project in service to children and the honeybees. Honeybees have been in crisis since the 1980’s. Two months after the project began, the mysterious and devastating worldwide phenomenon called CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, reared its head and compounded the threat to this already very challenged species. The Honeybee Project was a timely response.
As of the winter of 2009, Debra Roberts became fond Founder as she handed over her role as Executive Director of The Honeybee Project to a wonderful woman named Sister J SpiritVoice. Sister J is a beekeeper, bee educator, a musician, a visionary, and has a strong path that is a confluence of children’s education, honeybees and the arts. A great foundation has been built for The Honeybee Project since 2006 and Sister J is a force of nature and a perfect person to take this project to its next “oomgowah”. With a happy heart, Debra continues to consult, do honeybee education, be kept by her bees, and be(e) in the weave of some future multi-BEE-media with The Honeybee Project. She is now a Master Beekeeper (her BEEhD, as she calls it) and is also collaborating on various honeybee-related art projects with artists around the U.S.
Meet Debra in this wonderful video posted on YouTube.
