Katherine Holmsen is a PhD Anthropologist, Fulbright Scholar, and Global Health Strategist. She has held positions with NGOs, Johns Hopkins University, and the World Bank.

 

As a doctoral candidate, Katherine spent two years alone in the Borneo rainforest of Indonesia, living with and studying the Punan of the Kelai River, an Indigenous hunting and gathering people—just prior to the incursion of the logging industry that would accelerate the collapse of their foraging way of life. Based on her experience, she authored the dissertation, Out of the Forest and into the Market: Social and Economic Transformations in a Borneo Foraging Society. Her new memoir Sleeping with Leeches: Power, Seduction, and Two Years in the Borneo Forest tells the hidden, vulnerable story behind that adventure.

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Originally from Rhode Island, Katherine currently lives in Washington, DC.