Crystal Erlendson (she/they) serves as the lead visual storyteller for CIIS. She is responsible for aligning and driving the creative vision for the University with the goal to support CIIS' visibility as a forerunner in educating leading psychotherapists, healers, coaches, creatives, and activists through integral education, an embodied and whole-person approach of learning, teaching, and knowing.

For the past two decades she has been creating in film, media, programming, and ceremony at the intersections of community healing, mental health, matriarchy, indigenous futurism, and education. 

She believes in the revolution of co-producing with community and is a founding member of the matriarchal justice and peaceful parenting community Wild Roots. This community worked together on a social justice forest school and developing children's anti-bias and anti-racist community practices. The founding members developed emotional processing frameworks, and art and activist makings centered in communitarianism, allyship, power sharing, empathy, advocacy, consent, identity, and collaboration.

As a creative producer she has supported various experimental films with artist Sky Hopinka including Visions of an Island, Dislocation Blues, Małni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, I'll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You'll Become, wawa, and Fainting Spells. These films are part of collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center amongst others.

Crystal has beginning roots in painting and performance and comes from a family of Japanese American lei makers on Oahu on her mother's side and Icelandic engineers and farmers on her father's side. She currently resides in the woodlands of St. Helens, Oregon situated on the traditional, unceded lands of the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Grand Ronde, Siletz, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, and bands of Chinook people.