Maria is a climate justice lawyer, policy strategist, and writer. Her work is dedicated to movement-aligned efforts to spark cultural change and redesign systems such that we all have the capacity to meet our basic needs and thrive together. 

Founder of EnerGaia Consulting, she focuses on energy, water, and land justice and their intersections with democratic governance and economies grounded in solidarity. As co-founder of the People’s Utility Commons, she recently released a popular and political education curriculum on utility justice. 

Having spent over a decade engaged in coalitional policy advocacy at the nexus of housing, energy, and utility justice, Maria’s current passion is in re-envisioning and transforming broken, oppressive systems, raising critical consciousness, and building life-affirming ways and means to live in harmony and balance with the elements and each other. 

Maria supports the Ubuntu Climate Initiative's Economic Policy and Land Restoration program, which works at the intersection of community and climate work to support eco-cultural revitalization of degraded urban and rural lands within low-income Black and Indigenous communities. 

As a second/third generation Greek American, Maria is in an ongoing process of connecting with the pre-colonial lifeways of her ancestors while also recognizing the harms done by her settler-colonial and white-assimilating ancestors. She lives on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land in present day Oakland, California, where she loves to hike, listen to and play live music, and be in community.