The 30th annual SIMA Waterman’s is scheduled for Aug. 3 in Laguna Beach and Dianna Cohen is set to be recognized.
Dianna Cohen- Environmentalist of the Year
by Julia Cohen, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Plastic Pollution Coalition
Dianna Cohen is a visual artist and a passionate advocate for solutions to plastic pollution. She is Co-Founder and CEO of Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of more than 750 organizations, business and notable ambassadors working toward a world free of toxic plastic pollution. She is also my older sister.
Dianna Cohen
Dianna and I grew up in Southern California, where a love for the ocean was born. We grew up swimming, bodysurfing, diving, and longboarding. Our family was middle class, well educated, and valued time spent together, and in nature, especially at the beach and in the mountains. We traveled a across the United States and Europe for many holidays and entire summers, camping, hiking, visiting friends, and going to parks, museums, monuments, and historic places. Along the way, and particularly when our parents were catching up with friends in homes and cafes in incredible cities like Paris, Amsterdam, or Rome, Dianna would paint and draw. She sold her first painting at the age of nine.
After graduating from UCLA with a degree in fine arts in 1989, she continued to develop a career as an artist, painter, and curator. In her work as a visual artist, she began making sculptural and wall pieces out of plastic bags, which she would cut up and sew back together, exhibiting these artworks in galleries, foundations, and museums.
Her work of the past 30 years explores the materiality of plastic and its relationship to culture, media, toxicity, and the world at large.
In 2007, Dianna first learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and spent a year developing a proposal to travel to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to harvest the “plastic island” and make art out of it, raising awareness about the plastic pollution crisis in our oceans. The project was the perfect opportunity to meld her love for the ocean with the primary medium of her artwork — plastic bags — and to raise awareness and inspire change.
As she learned more about the issue of plastic pollution, she realized that we could not simply “clean it up” but instead, needed to “turn off the tap” and stop the flow of plastic into our oceans and our lives.
As a natural extension of this idea, in 2009, Dianna and I with other thought-leaders, scientists, and activists, founded Plastic Pollution Coalition in order to raise awareness and promote solutions to the global plastic pollution crisis.
In 2010, Dianna was invited to give a TED Talk on Mission Blue in the Galapagos Islands. Entitled “Tough Truths About Plastic Pollution,” her talk has been viewed more than 1 million times.
Dianna Cohen attends the United Nations x Parley For The Oceans Launch Event in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Parley for the Oceans)
She is a frequent lecturer and speaker, having spoken at United Nations and other major international conferences and symposia. Dianna is frequently in the news, having been interviewed by Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, NBC Nightly News, and The New York Times, among others.
As a result of her organizing and advocacy work with Plastic Pollution Coalition, Dianna has been the recipient of the Snow Angel Award, Global Green Award, IGLA award, and 1% For the Planet Award, among others.
Dianna’s 10 years of activism to address the challenge, created by Big Oil and Big Plastic, towards a world free of plastic pollution, has yielded incredible results especially in the past two years with a “Sea Change” of awareness, individual and corporate actions, and new legislation to stop single use plastic pollution.
“It’s my hope and vision that we will achieve a world free of plastic pollution, where single-use plastic is a relic of the past,” she often says. “Together we have moved the needle, raised awareness, and pushed for change. As Ryunosuke Satoro said: ‘Individually, we are a drop, together an ocean.’”
I couldn’t be more proud.
