Our Story

About Us

We are an artist, ecologist, and textile designer. Our collaboration is inspired by our wide-ranging work in biodiversity, sustainability, historical museum specimens, photography, fashion, and life-long learning. Our first successful collaboration – hand towels featuring insect collections – was to benefit St. Jude. Now we are working on a variety of projects that support conservation efforts, especially for rare plants affected by climate change.
Image

Leah Sobsey

For more than a decade, I’ve been making work that invites dialogue between art and science as a way to understand climate change and species loss over time. My tools are 19th-century photographic processes combined with digital technology – media that represent technological change over time. Collections, my first monograph featuring this work, was released in 2016. I was also part of the documentary team that produced Daylight Books’ best-selling Bull City Summer. My work is exhibited internationally in galleries, public spaces, and museums, and has also appeared in New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, and Audubon.org. I am an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Image

Emily Meineke, Ph.D.

My work is anchored in understanding how human influence has affected plants and insects. I use experiments and historical specimens to study how plant-insect interactions have changed over the past 200 years. I was an EPA STAR Fellow at North Carolina State University, a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria, and am now Assistant Professor of Urban Landscape Entomology at UC Davis.
Image

Anne Schroth

I own and operate Red Canary, a digital fabric print studio in downtown Greensboro, NC. Since earning my bachelor’s degree from the College of Design at North Carolina State University, I’ve been digitally printing fabric since 1999, working with artists and designers all over the world.
Image
At the foundation of Puritea and all that it means, is appreciation. Presently acknowledging what tea has given, and will provide in the future, encourages us to keep our tea as it was originally envisioned, while bringing an elegantly flavorful and original experience to you.