Kaarina Kailo, Ph.D. is a Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies with past positions as a research scholar at universities in Finland and Canada, and as senior fellow at the Finnish Academy. As an author, Kaarina has published hundreds of articles on folklore, spiritual bathing, saunas and sweat lodges, modern matriarchal studies, Northern women’s culture, Indigenous worldview and theory, the gift economy and the bear religion, as well as books such as The Woman Who Married The Bear: The Spirituality of the Ancient Foremothers, co-authored with Barbara Alice Mann (2023); Sauna Culture, Sweat and Spirituality (2025) and Finnish Goddess Mythology, the Golden Woman and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (2020). As an artist working in a variety of mediums, Kaarina’s work has been shown at numerous art exhibitions.