Moments in Bloom

Alexis Agliano Sanborn is a humanities specialist in Japanese studies. Her work has been published in Gastronimica, Kyoto Journal, Global Asia, and a forthcoming MIT Press book chapter. She directed the award-winning documentary short Nourishing Japan (2020), which explores the impact of food education and the school lunch system on Japanese communities. Sanborn has pursued her interest in seasons and seasonality through her artwork, teaching herself how to forage, and researching the history of time reckoning and seasonal motifs in Japanese culture and artwork. Together with Kit Lanthier, Sanborn launched the podcast Season by Season: An Audio Odyssey through Nature, which explores the 24 seasons of the Japanese lunar calendar through prose, poetry, history, and sound. In 2025, she is leading a 24 Seasons Art Cohort to help people discover a closer relationship to the natural world through nature journaling.

Kit Lanthier is a voracious reader who loves to get lost in the written word. After graduating from Mills College with a major in International Relations, Lanthier spent three years living and working in Japan. While in Japan, she pursued another of her passions—tea—and became a student of the Omotesenke School of Tea, the study of which she continues even after moving back home to California. Calming moments in the tea room, along with her lifelong love of literature, have inspired her study and practice of haiku, which she composes regularly. Together with Alexis Agliano Sanborn, Lanthier launched the podcast Season by Season: An Audio Odyssey through Nature, which explores the 24 seasons of the Japanese lunar calendar through prose, poetry, history, and sound. Lanthier lives with her husband and cats in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she spends her weekends learning how to garden, motivated by memories of her grandmothers.