Meet our director
Hi, I’m Carolyn.
I founded The Field School of Hvar, because I believe that schools can be an engine for healthy communities and a powerful instrument for building agency in young people.
I am an American by birth and upbringing. I now live on Hvar with my partner and our young son, who are both Croatian. We chose to live on Hvar because of the free-range childhood that we felt the island could offer our family. Recognizing that other families - both Croatian and international - share our aspiration for a holistic approach to child development, I began investigating how I could bring together the best possible educational community in our island paradise.
Before coming to Hvar, I began my career in grassroots placemaking, convening a festival of culture and technology that drew 20,000 attendees. I went on to work under the head of operations and fundraising at The Aspen Institute, a global think tank based in Washington, D.C. I am a “double Hoo” with an undergraduate degree in literature and an MBA from the University of Virginia.
Outside of work, home, and learning Croatian, my passions are (as you might expect from the themes in our program) hiking, gardening, and reading. I am extremely grateful for all the wonderful people I have already met on this journey to launch The Field School of Hvar, and look forward to meeting new allies and co-conspirators as we continue onward. If you are inspired by the work we’re doing, please get in touch!
Our Fall Team
Klaudia Mankosova
Early YearsKlaudia is an Early Years educator with over seven years of experience and a strong background in outdoor and nature-based learning. She began her career as a teaching assistant at a forest school in Connecticut while completing her BA in Psychology, where she focused on child development. She then moved to the Czech Republic, to work as an Early Years teacher in a setting that combined forest school, outdoor education, and Reggio-inspired approaches. She is currently completing her M.ed in Early Childhood Education.
Early Years
Meet our faculty and a few returning families in our Early Years Open House.
Jordan Reese
Early YearsJordan is an educator with a background spanning Reggio Emilia–inspired teaching, curriculum development, art studio direction, and outdoor education. She holds a Master's in Curriculum & Instruction with a specialization in Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Learners from the University of Denver, and has spent the past several years building her own nature-based learning program in Los Angeles.
Upper School Open House
Meet faculty and families for our tween and teen cohorts.
Language Arts
The focus of Language Arts in the fall is Homer’s Odyssey. We will explore this text with two major projects: making our own wooden sailboat and performing rhapsodies in the Homeric oral tradition.
Geza Frank
Upper SchoolGéza is a historian by passion and practice, with a rare depth of knowledge in the ancient world that he pursues not only in books but in the field. He has retraced the routes of ancient armies across the Alps and sailed the Danube aboard a reconstructed Roman vessel — the kind of hands-on, experiential scholarship that turns the distant past into something students can see, feel, and understand. It makes him an extraordinary guide for the questions at the heart of his classes: how the voyages of the Odyssey would truly have felt, and how the people of antiquity actually lived, worked, traveled, and made the world around them.
Born in Vienna and educated at the city's Lycée Français, Géza is also a professional flautist and piper who earned bachelor's and master's degrees with honours in Irish traditional music from the University of Limerick. He is a captain in the Austrian Army and brings to Field a rare mix of curiosity, discipline, and wide-ranging knowledge — and the conviction that the past comes most alive when we step into it ourselves.
Samuel Suárez Murias
Lower SchoolSamuel is an international educator whose teaching has taken him across three continents. He holds an MA in Spanish as a Second Language and a BA in English Philology from the Universidad de Oviedo, and has spent more than a decade in the classroom — most recently as a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Universidad de Oviedo, and earlier at Shandong Normal University in China, where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Across these settings he has taught students of every age and level, with a gift for meeting learners where they are and making demanding material feel within reach.
Andrew Dodson
Wooden BoatsAndrew is a civil engineer, carpenter, and kayak builder from Tennessee who also helped run the River Gorge Forest School and co-founded a nature retreat with his family. He is someone who builds things, loves the water, and believes children deserve to learn how the physical world works by working with their hands.
This fall, Andrew and his family will join our community on the island. Together with our students, they'll build a real wooden vessel - an unforgettable fusion of STEAM and social studies skills development - on an Adriatic island with thousands of years of boatmaking history.
Jennifer Reif
"Rhapsody" - Dramatic PerformanceJennifer has been teaching, directing, and performing, around the Pacific Northwest for decades. She created Clay and Play, an inclusive outdoor summer arts program, served as Education Director for Studio East, Training for the Performing Arts, co-founded SecondStory Repertory Theatre, and has led drama programs for both public and private schools. She is a member of TPS (Theatre Puget Sound), AATE (American Alliance for Theatre and Education) and loves sharing her creative energy with other drama teachers.
She holds her BA in Theatre from Morningside College, and also studied at Oxford University in England. Her time with The Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis filled her with a life-long passion for working and playing with young people. Her shelves are lined with children’s books and her happy place is in the woods. Jennifer has several theatre credits to her name, but her favorite roles of all-time are “Mom” to her adventurous kids and “Wife” to her theatre musician husband. Jennifer offers professional development for drama teachers worldwide.
Eleanor Ford
HallowtideEleanor is an avid maker of things, mother of two, workshop facilitator, community group organizer, homeschooling parent, author of Creative Spaces on Substack, and chief mess maker at the creative business Mini Mad Things. In her work, Eleanor shares practical ideas for bringing creative practices into one’s home or community spaces, deep-dives into art and craft techniques along with easy-to-do printable activity sheets. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Jewellery Design and a Masters in Textiles.
Eleanor will be leading a community celebration of Hallowtide during Field’s fall session. Drawing on local spiritual traditions, she will facilitate a secular ceremony that invites kids and parents to consider the loss, renewal, and transformation of the fall
Math & Quantitative Reasoning
Our goal is to bring the beauty and usefulness of math to life for learners through cooking, entrepreneurship, nature study and, for older learners, an exploration of Euclid’s Elements, one of the first and most enduring works of mathematical reasoning.
Samuel Suárez Murias
Upper SchoolSamuel is an international educator whose teaching has taken him across three continents. He holds an MA in Spanish as a Second Language and a BA in English Philology from the Universidad de Oviedo, and has spent more than a decade in the classroom — most recently as a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Universidad de Oviedo, and earlier at Shandong Normal University in China, where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Across these settings he has taught students of every age and level, with a gift for meeting learners where they are and making demanding material feel within reach.
Shameel Ahmad
Learning DesignShameel is a professor of economics, most recently on faculty at Rhodes College in Memphis, where he participated in its Political Economy Program. He holds a Ph.D. in economics with distinction from Yale University, a Master’s in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from London School of Economics, and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Stanford. Shameel’s research interests center on economic history, economic development and international economics. He is currently writing - beautifully and accessibly - about the relationship between technology and cognition on Substack here.
Shameel joins the Field School math team as a curriculum advisory, helping us weave together a sturdy baseline of engaging, developmentally appropriate math education along with our interdisciplinary explorations of social entrepreneurship and economic history.
Michael Freer
Social EntrepreneurshipMichael Freer is the founder of Jedna Mladost, a youth social innovation program in the mainland city of Split. Related to this work, he has created an accelerator program for artisan social entrepreneurship in the nearby town of Kaštela, through which youth and disabled individuals design and create products which honor their landscape, heritage, and future. In the fall, older learners at The Field School will visit this project, which is a more mature version of our own Field Store initiative, for inspiration and mentorship.
Dan Mifsud
FoodwaysDan spent his early adult life working as a field biologist on conservation projects, working with sea turtles in Greece, forest birds in Hawaii and coyotes in California, before completing an MSc in Ecology, a second MSc in Genetics and a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics. But his passion for food was too strong to ignore and he eventually ditched a career in a molecular lab for one in the kitchen. It is memories of the food of his grandparents, eaten under the hot Maltese sun as a child, that inspired him to follow this path.
Dan became a chef, initially staging at a Michelin-starred restaurant in London. He dabbled with ice cream: gelato and granita. And eventually he settled on bread. He founded a sourdough bakery cafe called The Almond Thief, a nod to his deep connection to the Mediterranean, which he ran for twelve years. During that time, he was also a founding member of a local flour mill, which continues to grow, mill, and bake all within the limits of one small south Devon village.
Alongside the bakery he has catered all manner of events large and small, from high-end weddings to off-grid family camps, and offered all manner of training - kids cooking bread over a fire, workshops at fermentation festivals and whole weekends spent teaching the art of sourdough. His son has been home-educated all his life and Dan has been privileged to be able to bring my passion for food and cooking into the home education communities and settings his family has been part of.
At The Field School of Hvar, Dan will bring his skills in food systems, appreciation, and cooking to our math program, which is linked with artisan entrepreneurship.
Social Studies
Our interdisciplinary focus in the fall is prehistory and Ancient Greece, eras that have left vibrant traces on Hvar. Our major project will be to mine the past for inspiration and perspective on apparel - materials, techniques, motifs, and ideas of beauty.
Geza Frank
Upper SchoolGéza is a historian by passion and practice, with a rare depth of knowledge in the ancient world that he pursues not only in books but in the field. He has retraced the routes of ancient armies across the Alps and sailed the Danube aboard a reconstructed Roman vessel — the kind of hands-on, experiential scholarship that turns the distant past into something students can see, feel, and understand. It makes him an extraordinary guide for the questions at the heart of his classes: how the voyages of the Odyssey would truly have felt, and how the people of antiquity actually lived, worked, traveled, and made the world around them.
Born in Vienna and educated at the city's Lycée Français, Géza is also a professional flautist and piper who earned bachelor's and master's degrees with honours in Irish traditional music from the University of Limerick. He is a captain in the Austrian Army and brings to Field a rare mix of curiosity, discipline, and wide-ranging knowledge — and the conviction that the past comes most alive when we step into it ourselves.
Fatima Espina Coeto
Lower SchoolFátima is a bilingual educator with more than five years of experience teaching children and adolescents across a range of settings. She has taught World History, social sciences, and the humanities in both English and Spanish, designing her own curricula and learning materials, and earlier worked as a camp guide and mentor, leading recreational and team-building activities for young people. She holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science and a master's in Social Leadership from the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, in Mexico.
A native Spanish speaker who teaches comfortably in two languages, Fátima is at home leading groups outdoors and brings to Field a warmth and energy well suited to guiding our youngest students in their first explorations of the wider world.
Ben Reason & Mette Reitzel
Social EntrepreneurshipBen Reason and Mette Reitzel are joining the Field School as parents and fellows to support the social enterprise element of the Field Store.
Ben is the founder of pioneering service design studio LiveWork. Over the past 20+ years he has worked with a diverse range of organisations, from global corporations via government agencies to tiny NGOs, with the aim of using design-thinking to serve their clients better. Mette is a documentary filmmaker with a background in photography, anthropology and high-end commercials. They are looking forward to bringing their experience and expertise from London to Hvar for the autumn season.
Tonći Bavčević
SailingTonči is an islander, marine engineer, competitive sailor, and dad. Starting his career as an engineer for on oil and gas rigs, he has been working on boats for his entire career, and knows the island’s waters like his front yard.
All Upper School learners have weekly sailing lessons in the fall.
Biology
Learners will immerse in natural science, drawing on Aristotle’s foundational studies, which he developed through study of an island similar to Hvar. The Field School learners and faculty will work with community partners to establish a compost operation, utilizing waste from the grape and olive harvests.
Mario Graćin
Regenerative AgricultureMario is the founder and owner of Soil Regenerative Landscaping & Practices. He is an ecological agronomist, drawing on years of experience designing Mediterranean landscapes that are not only stunning, but resilient and ecologically sound. He holds a Bachelor’s in Organic Agriculture from the University of Zagreb and is also a skilled trumpet player.
Mario and his team will advise The Field School in best practices for establishing a professional-grade compost operation on Hvar, providing coordination and expertise on issues such as measuring microbial activity, mineral levels, and other key variables.
Beatrice Carnelos
Upper & Lower SchoolBeatrice Carnelos holds a Master of Science in Climate Change from the University of Copenhagen and a Bachelor in Natural Sciences from the University of Padua, and she has spent much of the past decade leading camps, workshops, and farm-based learning across Italy and Northern Europe. Most recently she worked at an educational farm in the Veneto, designing daily activities that bring children together with animals, gardens, and the rhythms of agroecological life. Before that, she led international youth volunteer camps for Legambiente across several summers. Fluent in Italian, English, and Spanish, Beatrice teaches the way Field School believes children learn best: outside, hands in the soil, with curiosity as the compass.
Hrvoje Bota
Farm VisitIn the fall, older learners will visit Mikrofarma Mrvica, the most mature permaculture farm in Dalmatia having been in operation for over 20 years. Hrvoje and his wife will provide training in specific aspects of permaculture design, particularly compost, as well as the unique techniques which they employ to grow food in the Mediterranean biome.