Nicole Ciulla

Niki Ciulla grew up in Central Wisconsin along the Wisconsin River and has always lived along rivers since, touring the Midwest while she earned her degrees and began her career in teaching.

She has BA and MA degrees in Literature from Saint Mary’s University and University of South Dakota, respectively.

After teaching for several years at different types of institutions—a four-year public university, two technical colleges, and a community education program for English language learners—she realized that she wanted to further study writing pedagogies that helped support students of varying backgrounds and abilities.

This desire, coupled with her interest in environmental writing and communication, brought her to the PhD program in Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota where she became deeply involved in the first-year writing program as a Teaching Assistant Mentor, a Teaching Fellow, and a regular contributor to professional development. She was awarded the Teaching Excellence Award for graduate students in her department in 2018.

She finished her doctoral degree in 2020 with the completion of her dissertation, Temporal Rhetorics of Local Climate Action, and after 2 years as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Saint Mary’s University, she joined the faculty at Winona State.

As a graduate student, she became interested in community engaged research methods while participating in local climate action efforts in the Twin Cities area.

She continues to study, publish, and present on climate communication and to serve on multiple environmental committees for the local government.

Always looking for beneficial overlap between research and teaching, she’s been developing community partnership projects with her students to explore the possibilities of civic engagement with them.

One of her current passion projects is to expand the number of community gardens and food growing resources for Winona residents.