Timoteo Granzotti is a Senior Designer and Instructor for The Resilient Community Design Program at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC). He holds 20 years of experience in California and Mediterranean native ecology. Timo specializes in whole-systems design, agroforestry, TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) and ethnobotany, focusing on the dynamic relationship between humans and nature.

He has taught and consulted on projects throughout California, the USA, The Brazilian Amazon, Costa Rica, and Kenya. He has worked in various sectors, from urban to broad-acre, with an emphasis on BIPOC and indigenous regenerative land stewardship, food systems, and native biodiversity.

In 2014, Timo was curriculum developer and co-lead instructor for Pathways to Resilience (P2R), a re-entry Permaculture certification program for formerly incarcerated individuals from select California prisons, at Merritt College. He was a guest speaker for the 35th Annual EcoFarm Conference, and in 2024 gave a talk on Ecological Resiliency for TEDx.

He collaborates with many groups, organizations and events annually, working as a teacher, organizer, and consultant. Timo is also a certified wilderness skills expert with a passion for Indigenous technologies, and was a founding co-organizer for the Buckeye Gathering, an annual earth-skills based immersive.  He is an interdisciplinary artist, sculptor and craftsman whose interest lies in the creative use of his hands, and the preservation of intergenerational knowledge, art, and cultural history. 

Of mixed Ethiopian-Italian ethnicity, his foundations began with diverse cultural and ecological landscapes that deeply influenced his path: exposure to the vast wilderness and Indigenous First Nations of Alaska, where he was born, his formative years living in Sicily, and travels throughout Italy, Europe, and North Africa. It was from those early years that his varied interests in anthropology, history, literature, art, and culture deepened. Moving back to the United States, he studied black-and-white photography with the desire to be a writer and photojournalist. Plants pulled him instead. He switched his studies to botany, and a new path began.