Glesta began her project WATERSHED when she was invited to do work through the video art organization ARTPORT_Making Waves and the United Nations during the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009. Like many of her projects, she engaged in research to learn more about the topic. Through beautiful and sometimes lyrical imagery, her multi-channel video installation engaged the viewer in a story of how women on the continents of the planet are affected by global warming.
WATERSHED was first projected on the wall of St Patrick’s Basilica during the New Museum, Ideas Cities Festival in New York City in 2013, just months after Hurricane Sandy devastated the Lower East Side. The work was projected in London in 2015, on the face of the National Theater on the Thames. In 2016, WATERSHED became an immersive video on the entire floor of the lobby of the Customs House for an Al Gore climate change conference. And in 2017 it was projected on an eighty-foot sidewalk in front of the Brooklyn Public Library in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an area that had been devastated by Hurricane Sandy five years prior.
Within the colorful moving imagery, Glesta integrated both the science and socio-politics of climate change. For the 2017 iteration in Brooklyn, she organized a panel of scientists, community organizers, the Mayor’s office of resilience, and the Brooklyn Borough President and current mayor, Eric Adams, to bring attention to a community that had suffered damage and neglect since the hurricane five years prior.