Dr. Leslie Van Gelder
Dr. Leslie Van Gelder was a member of the early TLCT board in 2019-2020 and returned in 2026 to support work in the area of Heritage.
Leslie's academic background is in the field Place Studies and Experiential Education. She has been on the faculty of Walden University since 2002 where she supervises doctoral students in global and indigenous education.
Her own research focuses on Upper Paleolithic cave art and the lifeways of the people who made finger flutings, lines drawn on the walls of caves, in modern day France, Spain, and Australia. She is especially interested in the ways in which people of those time periods encountered and responded to periods of rapid climate change.
She has been the Chair of the Glenorchy Heritage and Museum Group since 2017 and been involved with the group since 2010.
She is very active in the arena of Dark Skies protection and chairs the Tāhuna Glenorchy Dark Skies Group who were successful in becoming an International Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2025. She also serves as a Trustee on Winterstellar, an arts based Dark Skies organisation looking to support Dark Skies initiatives across Otago, and consults for other regions on the development of their own Dark Skies places.
She chairs the QLDC Climate Reference Group, Co-Chairs the Southern Lakes Sanctuary, and serves as Co-Site Custodian for Tāhuna Glenorchy with Darren Rewi for the Preserving Legacies International Program which focuses on the intersection of climate change and heritage and is supported by National Geographic, ICOMOS, and the Center for Climate Change. She also serves on the governance group of the Upper Lakes Integrated Catchment Group and is Glenorchy's librarian.
