Our Minister and Staff

Farin Cloyd began her role as Office Administrator in July 2021. Farin grew up in Union City, TN until she moved to Chattanooga in 2016 for college. She graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2020 with a B.A. in Communication and a minor in Political Science. While in school, she served as the Director of New Member Experience and Vice President of Philanthropy for the Nu Beta Chapter of Alpha Gamma Delta. Farin worked as a staff feature writer for the University Echo and completed two Public Relations/Digital Media Internships before graduation. Through her internships, she worked with the local healthcare providers and UTC’s campus to provide COVID testing and vaccines to Chattanooga’s minority communities and students. After graduation, she worked briefly as a content manager and copywriter in the insurance field before starting her role at UUCC. In her free time, she enjoys romance novels, blogging and photography.

Karla is a theologically trained, reindigenizing human committed to loving herself a little better every single day. She dreams of being feral, free, and self actualized in a way that is medicinal to the ecosystem of communities that claim her as their own. She is a lover of language and of ritual, and a student of symbol. in her creative practices, she explores how language can be employed in ritual as a facilitator of connection and how symbol can act as a threshold into the indescribable. 

She is lover of fiction authored by Black Femmes. The work of Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler have been central to the theological formation of her current self as well as major inspirations of the musical cosmologies she creates.

Karla began producing music while matriculating through Vanderbilt Divinity School as a way to counter the weight of existential crisis. She continued because through this practice of creation, she discovered her wholeness already in tact.