ABOUT

Our Story

Creative Nature NYC was invented by Katherine Patiño Miranda, a Brooklyn-based Colombian artist whose creative practice celebrates on our shared interdependence with the natural world.

 

After studying art, dance, pedagogy, and yoga in both New York City and Europe, Katherine spent time working in a deeply inspiring forest school in Switzerland—and later in far less inspiring school environments back in the city. That contrast stayed with her. She began asking a simple but important question: What if kids were truly free to be with nature? To play with it, listen to it, and create alongside its rhythms rather than apart from them?

 

Out of that question, Creative Nature NYC was born.

 

Founded in 2020, Creative Nature NYC is a distributed art, ecology, and creative play lab for kids and families across New York City. We gather in city parks and indoor community spaces, meeting children where they already are and inviting them into shared moments of curiosity, making, and discovery.

Mission

Our mission is to honor kids’ playful and creative selves by offering an unstructured, unhurried, loving space for exploration and making. We believe collective play with nature is real research, generating the questions that shape the world around us.


 

The Ways We Learn Playing

 

Our approach is rooted in curiosity, co-creation, and playing with nature. We explore the park as a Living Lab, where children learn by being in active relationship with the natural world. We honor the many ways children think and express themselves through drawing, movement, building, sound, storytelling, and quiet observation. Every project begins with discovery and grows through hands-on experimentation shaped by what children notice, wonder about, and try together.
 

In this process, the environment becomes our third teacher. Natural and recycled materials are not fixed supplies, but invitations—sticks, soil, water, leaves, and found objects become tools for invention rather than instructions to follow. Playing with nature means listening, responding, and creating alongside the rhythms of place, season, and weather.
 

Our work is inspired by the Reggio Emilia tradition of child-led learning, the liberatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and the ecological teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh—especially the idea that learning happens through relationship, attention, and care. In practice, this means we trust children as capable thinkers, encourage dialogue and collaboration, and treat the natural world not as a backdrop, but as an active teacher and creative partner.
 

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Our Philosophy

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We are always immersed in a wise loving teacher we call the environment. Listening to and observing the landscape around us is, in itself, a form of deep learning. Each morning in our Living Labs begins this way: walking mindfully beneath the trees, noticing light and shadow, tuning our bodies and attention to where we are.
 

Laughter becomes a form of discourse. Sticks and stones turn into waypoints for adventuring. Anthills point us toward the many beings we share space with. Shade becomes an experiment in understanding the material we call the sun. Immersion is not just something we do—it is a way of seeing, relating, and building from the world we are already inside of.

 

At Creative Nature NYC, we believe the idea that humans are “separate” from nature is one of the great illusions of our time. Children experience the opposite. Through play, observation, and creation, they notice patterns, touch textures, imagine ecosystems, and make meaning through art that reflects their belonging in the living world.
 

Being with nature—and with our own creative nature—makes space for empathy, care, and imaginative possibility. This way of learning, living, and making together is the heart of Creative Nature NYC’s Living Lab.


Living Lab