After living and working in New York City for many years, Diana Hartel took up a somewhat nomadic life, traveling to write on ecosystem health and to paint in wild places throughout the United States and British Columbia, Canada. She graduated from Columbia University with a doctorate in epidemiology and concentrations in infectious diseases and environment-related chronic diseases. She has held faculty positions at Columbia University and Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, and has published widely for biomedical journals, including, as a co-author, in The New England Journal of Medicine. Additionally, she served at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland for three years, chairing inter-agency projects with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She created two non-profit organizations, Bronx Community Works in New York in 1993 and Madrona Arts in Oregon in 2006. Both organizations addressed issues of social and environmental justice. The Oregon-based Madrona Arts primarily employed arts to raise awareness of ecosystems and efforts to restore lives within them, human and non-human.