Actor and activist, Dawn Olivieri, is halfway through an interview when she abruptly halts the conversation, apologizing as she does so. A truck has just pulled onto her property, Moon Mountain Sanctuary, located outside of Mena, Arkansas, ready to drop off horses.
“I need to videotape this,” she says before hanging up, promising to call back.
If all one had to go by was Dawn’s screen résumé, one might think she was taking possession of some pedigreed mounts, an affectation of a rich and pampered Hollywood type. One could not be more wrong in that assumption.
These just-arrived horses are wild, and at their new home, they will join a herd of about two hundred just like them. There’s little glamorous or glorious about the conditions that brought them here or about the work it takes to feed and care for that many animals, save for the feeling it gives the Florida-born actress to see them safe on a picturesque piece of Arkansas land.
“It’s funny,” she says after she calls back. “I create characters by how I think. This rescue came about because I didn’t think. This effort truly was born out of a heartfelt motivation to take action, and not in some grand way. It was this perfect kaleidoscope of a moment. I saw these horses owned by a kill buyer, pop up on Facebook; they were these beautiful mama-baby pairs. Apparently, they were reservation horses; I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t even know what I was looking at.”
Born and raised in Florida, Dawn was always around animals. Her mother, a transplanted Michigan dairy farmer, saw to that. “My mom brought the dairy farm to the suburbs, essentially,” she says. “Even though we did live in a cul-de-sac, we had every imaginable animal you could think of, that you could legally have in a suburb. We backed up to a plant nursery, so there were these big fields behind us for a long time before it turned into a development.
“I remember at my earliest times, my mom used to raise rabbits, even for food for us. Imagine in a suburb we had stacks and rows of rabbit cages, and my mom was very frontierswoman; she would skin a rabbit on the porch and then take the beating heart and let me hold it. I grew up like that, with animals both a food source and a play friend from the very beginning.”
Dawn gravitated to show business and has spent more than twenty years building a career in television and movies. In 2021, she hit the first of several Taylor Sheridan projects with 1883, followed closely by roles on Yellowstone (2022-2024), Lioness (2024-2026) and 2026’s The Madison among many other projects.
But it was when she wasn’t working, during the 2023 actors’ strike, that the ball started rolling on a project that would bring her to Arkansas where, with customary impulsiveness, she bought the land from which Moon Mountain would rise.
Asked what, out of all the one hundred sixty-acre plots in the world, brought her to the one outside Mena, she shrugs. “I was looking at Oklahoma because I have family in Oklahoma and I just wasn’t loving any of it,” she says. “I didn’t like the topography. I’m very much more a mountain girl; I love creeks and streams and water. I want things to be abundant, right? Especially when you have animals, it just makes it easier if there’s abundance.
“Mena is really beautiful. It’s got the mountains and trees. I have this saying to myself, why don’t you go live where everybody takes a vacation? A lot of people come to retire here, and some people would look at that like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go there. That’s where all the old people are.’ But they’re onto something.”
With land and time on her hands, the only other thing to put her plan in motion was funds. She decided to make the project pay for itself in ways she deeply understood. “It would have been irresponsible for me to take on these mouths to feed if I don’t have a plan for an income,” she says. “So right in that moment, as I’m problem solving, creation plants the seed and goes, ‘Well, you’re good at content. Why don’t you trade content? Maybe people will send you money for food.’
“It made sense to me. One, I could show people what it takes to rescue an unhandled mare and her babies. Two, I was going to do two mares, two babies, and film the process of learning from not knowing what to do with them. That was my premise and I put it on my Instagram, and I didn’t have an extremely large following, maybe 30,000 followers. Almost before I could blink, the PayPal had the money to rescue twenty-nine horses. And there began Moon Mountain.”
With the original twenty-nine came the challenge of building enough infrastructure to accommodate both the rescued and their rescuer. Dawn didn’t shy away from the work even if she felt ill-equipped for it at the start.
“I move out to this place. I separate from my partner who has all the heavy machinery, and I don’t even have a truck with four-wheel drive, OK?” she says. “I have a Prius and this old Chevy truck that was cool in LA but not cool out here. I have no tractor. I have nothing to move any dirt. I really have nothing when you’re talking about living out in a place like this. But I wasn’t giving up; I was just gonna hunker down and wait the storm out.”
Her instincts were spot on as her early struggles were playing out under the silent but steady observation of locals who were curious if the woman who ‘ain’t from around here’ would throw up her hands and head back whence she came. Once satisfied she wouldn’t, help started to arrive.
“One of the first ladies that showed up was donating a whole trailer load of hay,” she says. “She kind of took me to the side and she’s like, ‘You know, I just want you to know the town’s watching you.’ I laughed at that; I was like, ‘Let them watch. Tell them that they can come help and they can watch from a real close seat.’”
Seeing that brand of gumption, people did start coming around, many of them bearing supplies or offering to lend their assistance. “That humbles you, to go out to your community and say, ‘I need help. Anyone that can help me I would really appreciate it,’ and then have people step up. They showed up and they donated hay and they fixed fence and fixed gates and donated water troughs. Even the local Tractor Supply showed up from watching my stuff on Instagram. They connected us with Purina, brought us free feed. I mean, it was unreal how much I believe creation wanted this to start.”
Today, the herd continues to grow while Moon Mountain works to find suitable, loving homes for its wild horses. The full menagerie also includes about seventy goats, a miscalculation on Dawn’s part about originally wanting to raise and sell goats only to find out there was no market for them. She’s also broadened her professional interests beyond acting to include launching a tech-driven initiative focused on equine wellness and sustainable ranching practices.
She hasn’t quite worked out all the answers to the issues facing wild horses in America yet. But here, surrounded by natural beauty and the help of those in her newfound, albeit part-time home, she’s saving those she can, sending that good out into the universe and waiting for a reply.
“What I hope is that I do this until the issue shifts, until the reality for them is different whether that means more legislation is put in place, more oversight, more safety,” she says. “I look towards that future and whatever it means. If it means I keep doing different versions of this, I think I always will. I think I’m in it for the long haul because when I give my word to something or a being, I’m seeing it through.
“Now, I’m sure eventually I will get slower and more tired, but I’m really proud of the structure that I’ve built. The cool thing about rescues is they’re like a fingerprint, a reflection of the person in charge. For me, I just love animals and creation so much and I was so focused on nature that I came up with this idea that everyone else has already been doing, but I had come up with this version for myself. And that’s my biggest piece of advice; I have so many people come to me and say, ‘I want to start a rescue. How do I do it?’ You have to just go for it, no matter the obstacles, and believe you’re going to succeed. No matter what.”
GET INVOLVED: Learn more about Moon Mountain Rescue, explore adoption opportunities and find out how you can be a part of their mission at moonmt.org.
