Jackson Wild Summit

Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken starts ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with heads of state and CEOs on climatic, economic and ecological regeneration. Business he has started include Erewhon, Smith & Hawken, and OneSun Solar (now called Energy Everywhere). He has appeared on numerous media including the Today Show, Talk of the Nation, Bill Maher, and Charlie Rose, and has been profiled or featured in hundreds of articles including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Washington Post, and Business Week. He has written eight books including five national and NYT bestsellers: The Next Economy, Growing a Business, The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest, and Drawdown (2017). The Ecology of Commerce was voted in 2013 as the #1 college text on business and the environment by professors in 67 business schools. He is published in 50 countries and 30 languages. His latest book, Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming debuted April, 2017 as the #9 NYT bestseller. He is the founder of Project Drawdown, which works with over two hundred scholars, students, scientists, researchers, and activists to map, measure, and model the one hundred most substantive solutions that can cumulatively reverse global warming by reducing and sequestering greenhouse gases. He lives in Mill Valley, California in the Cascade Creek watershed with his wife and coyotes, foxes bobcats, red-tail hawks and flocks of nuthatches.

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Sylvia Earle

Sylvia A. Earle is Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, Founder of Mission Blue/Sylvia Earle Alliance, Founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER), a Founding Ocean Elder, Chair of the Advisory Council for the Harte Research Institute and former Chief Scientist of NOAA. Author of more than 230 publications, leader of more than 100 expeditions with 7500 hours underwater, she is a graduate of Florida State University with MA and PhD degrees from Duke University and 31 honorary doctorates. Her research concerns the ecology and conservation of marine ecosystems and development of technology for access to the deep sea. She is the recipient of more than 150 national and international honors and awards including being named Time Magazine’s first Hero for the Planet, a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, Netherlands Order of the Golden Ark, recipient of the 2018 Princess of Asturias Prize for Concord (Peace), winner of the TED Prize (2009), and medals from the Explorers Club (1981,1996), Royal Geographic Society (2011 Patrons Medal), and the National Geographic (2013 Hubbard Medal).

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Paul Watson

CAPTAIN PAUL WATSON is a marine wildlife conservation and environmental activist. Watson was one of the founding members and directors of Greenpeace. The president of Ecuador bestowed Watson with the Amazon Peace Prize in 2007 and in 2012 he became only the second person after Captain Jacques Cousteau to be awarded the Jules Verne Award, an honor dedicated to environmentalists and adventurers.
In 1977 Watson left Greenpeace and founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. A renowned speaker, accomplished author, master mariner and lifelong environmentalist, Watson has been awarded many honors for his dedication to the oceans and to the planet. Among many commendations for his work, he received the Genesis Award for Lifetime Achievement, was named as one of the Top 20 Environmental Heroes of the 20th Century by Time magazine, and was inducted into the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame.

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Sean Carroll

Sean B. Carroll is the Executive Director of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios and the architect of HHMI’s filmmaking initiative. An internationally recognized biologist, award-winning author and educator, Sean oversees the largest portfolio of privately supported science education programs in the US. He has served as executive producer on broadcast, theatrical, and IMAX films including The Farthest, Amazon Adventure, and Mass Extinction and numerous short features. Sean is the author of several books including The Serengeti Rules, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and Remarkable Creatures. He has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016, Sean received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science.

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Aulani Wilhelm

Aulani Wilhelm is the Senior Vice President for Oceans at Conservation International. Her work bridges culture, community, and science to emerge innovations in ocean conservation. She has played a pivotal role in shaping the emerging field of large-scale ocean conservation, leading the design and establishment of the 1.5 million km2 Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, and as founder of Big Ocean.

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Beverly Joubert

Beverly is an intuitive photographer rather than a technical one, a person who lives and breathes Africa and its wild open places filled with big cats and elephants, racing zebras or bubbling lava flows. National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, just one of a select few chosen represent this level of professionalism in the Society, she has specialized in African photography for over 30 years, with images in a dozen or more National Geographic Magazines, in 11 books, and thousands of articles around the world.

Some would say that she and husband Dereck Joubert, are among the most famous wildlife filmmakers in the world, and in this pursuit she co-producers with Dereck and records sound. An equally important passion for Beverly is that of creating an image that tells a complete story in one instant, one frame; a story that is both a celebration of the sheer beauty and wonder of wildlife and also a window into its future.

She is a child of Africa and that seems to make all the difference because deeply embedded in her work is a knowledge of her subjects; she seems to understand the leopard through the highlights on the eyes and what it will do next, because she has seen it thousands of times before. She feels the mist swirl around a male lion… and we as observers of the image she gives us, can also feel the roar that is about to come from its mouth, because she has heard those roars daily for decades.

The authenticity of her work has been recognized by institutions like the American Academy of Achievement, and in The World Ecology Award, let alone eight Emmy Awards, a Peabody and endless other notable film awards that they have collected together. She is a founder of the Big Cats Initiative sits on Great Plains Conservation boards in Kenya and Botswana. Their TED talk (2010) has also been seen by thousands of people.

Her passion for wildlife is endless. Perhaps for Beverly, the most prestigious and valued accolade is the Presidential Order of Merit given to her by the former President of Botswana His Excellency Ian Khama, for work done for the enhancement of the reputation of Botswana via her images.

But Beverly’s eye for light and recognizing a unique moment in wildlife comes from quite simply doing the time in places she loves, with someone she loves and with a healthy blend of outrage against what is happening to these wild places and the precious animals she knows so well.

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Andrea Crosta

Andrea has over 30 years of experience in conservation projects around the world.
He is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Earth League International (formerly Elephant Action League), an intelligence-led organization dedicated to investigate environmental crime and support the work of law enforcement agencies.

He was the head of the investigative team that carried out the recent and most important investigation on illegal fishing in Baja California and the possible extinction of the vaquita (Operation Fake Gold), as well as the two most recent and successful investigations in China, Hong Kong and Vietnam on ivory and rhino horn trafficking (Operation Game Over and Operation Red Cloud).

Andrea is among the main protagonists of the Netflix’s documentary ‘The Ivory Game’, about elephant poaching and international ivory trafficking, and the National Geographic documentary ‘Sea of Shadows‘, about illegal fishing and the potential extinction of the Vaquita in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico (premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2019 – Audience Award).

He holds a master’s degree in Natural Sciences, a master’s degree in Business & Innovation, and a BSc in Psychology.

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Lesley Chilcott

LESLEY CHILCOTT is an award-winning filmmaker, documentarian and producer. Chilcott directed the feature documentaries A Small Section of the World and CodeGirl, the latter being the first feature-length film to premiere on YouTube, where it received a million views before going on to theaters and other outlets. She was a producer of the 2007 Academy Award®-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth and also produced the cult rock documentary It Might Get Loud (2008), featuring legendary guitarists The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White, and Waiting for “Superman”(2010), for which she won a PGA Award for Outstanding Producer of a Documentary Theatrical Motion Picture. Chilcott frequently shoots internationally on shorter form projects and prior to making documentaries worked at MTV networks on series and live multi-camera shows.

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Mike Gunton

Michael Gunton is the Creative Director of Factual and The Natural History Unit for BBC Studios. Within this role, Mike works as an executive producer on many BBC titles, acts as an ambassador for BBC Studios internationally, and is responsible for bringing new and pioneering stories about the natural world to global audiences. Mike has worked on many critically acclaimed series including Galapagos, Yellowstone, Madagascar, Life, Africa, Shark, Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur and Life Story, and speaks internationally at media and scientific gatherings as an ambassador for Natural History filmmaking, the BBC and the natural world. Mike’s most recent series include the record breaking Planet Earth II (winner of 4 BAFTAs and 2 Emmys and believed to have been viewed by approaching 1 billion people) and in 2018, the ground breaking animal behaviour series Dynasties.

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Giulio Boccaletti

Giulio Boccaletti, Ph.D., is the Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy. Trained as a scientist, Giulio is an expert on environmental sustainability and resource economics. In his role as Chief Strategy Officer, he works with other members of the Executive Team to develop the organization’s strategy and apply economic and scientific practice to our conservation agenda. Prior to his role as Chief Strategy Officer, Giulio was the Global Managing Director of the water programs at the Nature Conservancy, leading the organization’s work on water across over forty countries.

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Kalee Kreider

Kalee Kreider is the chief of content, communications and public affairs at the National Geographic Society. In this capacity, she leads the global nonprofit’s external communications and outreach strategies including, corporate communications, media relations, marketing, museums and experiences, social and digital media, creative and storytelling. Kreider also manages the organization’s public policy efforts. Together, her team will amplify the Society’s mission and impact to global audiences in order to achieve the organization’s vision.

Kreider’s career spans more than 25 years in communications, policy and politics, specializing in the areas of climate change, the environment, sustainability and technology. Throughout her consultancy career, Kreider has advised government agencies, corporations and nonprofit organizations in the United States and around the world and most recently served as a senior advisor to the United Nations Foundation and Vulcan, the technology company founded by Paul Allen. In 2014, Kreider began serving as a consultant to the National Geographic Society with a focus on science and exploration impact initiatives.

Previously, Kreider served as environmental adviser, communications director and spokesperson for former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. She was responsible for developing and managing a broad communications portfolio and liaising with executives on policy issues at Apple, Google, Current TV, Generation Investment Management and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In this capacity, she helped research and market three best-selling books, an Oscar-winning film and a top-selling app for the iPhone and iPad. Kreider also assisted with the slideshow that became the basis for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Earlier in her career, Kreider served as senior vice president at Fenton Communications specializing in global warming and the environment. She also worked for a decade in the nonprofit sector directing environmental programs and was a Truman Scholar-in-Residence in the Clinton administration. She is a graduate of Rollins College where she earned a degree in history.

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Howard Hall

Howard Hall specializes in underwater giant format film production. IMAX films directed by Howard include Into the Deep, Island of the Sharks, Deep Sea 3D, and Under the Sea 3D. Hall has also contributed to many other giant format productions as director of photography including The Living Sea, Journey Into Amazing Caves, Coral Reef Adventure, Journey to the South Pacific, Humpback Whales and Lost Worlds. Hall has made numerous television films for broadcasters including PBS Nature, National Geographic, the BBC. He is the recipient of six Emmy Awards and won the Jackson Hole Festival Choice Award in 1991 for Best Picture.
Howard is a member of the Directors Guild and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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Ronan Donovan

Host, co-executive producer and cameraman for the Nat Geo WILD three-part special KINGDOM OF THE WHITE WOLF, National Geographic Explorer and Photographer Ronan Donovan’s passion for conserving wild animals and wild places was ignited during his years as a field biologist. Donovan also inherited a healthy sense of curiosity and wanderlust from his parents, who crossed the Atlantic in a 35-foot sailboat and raised their two sons closer to the natural world in the forests of Vermont.

A field biologist turned photographer, Donovan’s interest in learning about elusive wildlife has led him to visit all seven continents. The transition from field biologist to photographer came out of a year spent in Africa’s equatorial jungle using photography as a research tool to understand more about wild chimpanzees. With Donovan using visual storytelling as a tool to reach a wider audience, his photographic journeys for National Geographic magazine include an entire year living inside Yellowstone National Park documenting the life of wild wolves; covering the human-wildlife conflict between wild chimpanzees and humans in Africa; investigating the legacy of the mountain gorillas Dian Fossey gave her life to save; and most recently, as featured in KINGDOM OF THE WHITE WOLF, documenting the story of a family of arctic wolves in the high Arctic on Ellesmere Island, Canada.

By showing the similarities we share with our fellow animals, Donovan ignites empathy for wild things around the world and urges us all to consider the parallels we share with our animal counterparts in order to value their existence. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, and continues his work on human-wildlife coexistence in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

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Diva Amon

Diva Amon is a Trinidadian deep-sea biologist who studies the weird and wonderful animals living in the deep ocean and how our actions are impacting them. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. Diva has participated in deep-sea expeditions around the world and has also done a considerable amount of science communication and public engagement. Additionally, Diva is a founder and director of the non-profit NGO, SpeSeas, dedicated to marine science, education and advocacy in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean.

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Patricia Fearnley

Patricia joined the BBC Production Panel in 1994. She worked in Production Management across a wide variety of departments in London with particular focus on Science, Business and Children’s programmes such as Troubleshooter Returns, Trouble at the Top, Walking with Beasts, Horizon, Wild Weather, Short Change, Dear Mr Barker, The Ben Elton Show, Krakatoa: The Last Days, and World War II: Behind Closed Doors. After 12 years in production, Patricia moved across to the commercial arm of the BBC working as Head of Factual in Content Acquisitions dealing with all BBC in-house factual content. She now specialises in one genre working as Head of Natural History in the Content Partnerships team within BBC Studios where she has worked across series including Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, Life Story, Spy in the Wild, Shark, Africa, The Hunt, Dynasties and Big Cats, with Seven Worlds, One Planet delivering this Autumn.

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Janet Vissering

As senior vice president of development and production for Nat Geo WILD, Janet Han Vissering is responsible for over 200 hours of programming commissioned each year for broadcast in 166 countries, 330 million homes and 34 languages worldwide.

In her role, Vissering oversees the premium natural history and animal-focused slates for all of National Geographic’s global networks and SVOD platforms, which includes National Geographic, Nat Geo WILD and now Disney+. She closely manages WILD’s development team, working with the world’s leading independent producers, distributors, creative agencies and strategic broadcast partners to create the network’s signature series, specials and events. She also provides daily oversight of production to ensure creative continuity and that all network programming objectives are being met — from project conception through delivery. Previously, she was SVP of strategic development and co-finance for seven years. As part of her development role, she has been responsible for creating key programs such as The Incredible Dr. Pol, Cesar 911, Animal Fight Night and Wild Brazil, among other highly rated shows.

Prior to acquiring her current position, Vissering served as vice president of international acquisitions at NGCI from August 1998 to March 2000. She joined NGCI from Discovery Networks International, where she was head of program acquisitions and development from 1995 to 1998, managing the acquisition and development of over 2,500 program hours annually.

Vissering joined Discovery Communications Inc. as a regional marketing manager for The Learning Channel, affiliate sales and relations, in March 1993. Prior to this role, she was a public affairs specialist for the Department of the Navy, based in Sasebo, Japan.

A graduate of the University of Maryland in College Park, with a major in international relations/business, Vissering is a native of Korea and speaks Korean fluently.

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Gail Jenkinson

Gail Jenkinson is a Director of Photography working in natural history, documentary and specialist factual. Filming on land, sea and air she has been fortunate enough to film in all seven continents. She is HSE qualified for filming underwater and is a specialist at working on boats, making her highly experienced at shooting aboard sea fairing vessels. These range from the high tech MV Alucia in the open ocean, to small catamaran’s bobbing upon fast moving rivers. She has visas allowing her to work in the US permanently as well as in her native UK. Gail is often employed in remote, challenging and sometimes hostile environments. Recent credits include, BBC’s Blue Planet 2, Dianne Fossey - Secrets in the Mist for National Geographic and Discovery’s Gold Rush White Water.

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Christina Karliczek-Skoglund

Christina Karliczek Skoglund is a wildlife and underwater filming specialist.
She works around the world for wildlife and expeditions series of BBC, NDR/Doclights, Terra Mater and Nat Geo Wild.
At the moment, you can find Christina in the chilly dark waters of Scandinavia and the Northeast Atlantic for several productions. She is currently producing ‘Cold Sharks’ for Doclights/ORF/CuriosityStream and partners.
Her camerawork is awarded at prestigious film festivals and has contributed to a nomination for an Emmy in Outstanding Cinematography in 2017. Christina was one of the principal camera people of 2015 Jackson Hole Wildlife Festival Winner ‘Congo - Deep and Dangerous’ .
It’s been the passionate photographic interest in aquatic environments that made her initially leave her path as camera operator for tv and fiction on land. Christina has channeled this passion with an eye for evolving technology into bringing engaging storytelling back up from a world that’s hidden to most people.

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Beth Allgood

Beth assures the strategic development and implementation of US projects, campaigns, and advocacy. She also leads IFAW’s innovative work to look beyond GDP for alternatives that better promote happiness and wellbeing for people, animals and the planet. Beth has presented in the halls of the US Congress, at the Convention on Biodiversity in Mexico and Egypt, and other conferences and venues in Washington DC and around the world. She has been quoted on whales in The Washington Post, on wildlife crime in USA Today, and has appeared on CNN and in the Boston Globe among other media outlets. She has worked in the private sector, in government and for non-profits including the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy in her 20-years in career in conservation and development.

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Jennifer Berglund

Jennifer Berglund tells the stories of science and nature through her films, photography and writing. She is the Co-founder of Prehensile Productions and Oh Sister Productions, and an Exhibit Developer, Writer and Digital Media Producer for four museums at Harvard University. Her work has taken her to all seven continents, from the depths of the Amazon Rainforest, to the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and even the bottom of the ocean. A former National Science Foundation/Jackson Wild STEM Media Fellow, she is a passionate advocate for the role of storytelling in science to engage society in the world’s most pressing issues.

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Michael Jasny

Michael Jasny is a Senior Policy Analyst at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) and Director of its Marine Mammal Protection Project. He is an expert in the law and policy of ocean noise pollution, and has worked domestically and internationally for two decades through litigation, lobbying, science-based policy development, and public advocacy to improve regulation of this emergent problem. Michael is also engaged in securing protection for endangered marine mammal populations and their critical habitat, opposing development projects that threaten marine mammals off North America, and improving management of fisheries and other sectors under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the leading U.S. instrument for the conservation of these species. Michael is an author or co-author of numerous publications in legal, policy, and scientific journals. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale College and J.D. from Harvard Law School.

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Alessandro Ponzo

Dr. Ponzo (DVM) has been studying marine mammals around the world since early 2000. In 2010, he founded the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines, where he has been working tirelessly to conserve marine megafauna throughout the country. He is a Kinship Fellow and a 2018 National Geographic Explorer.

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Emily Darling

Dr Emily Darling investigates how tropical coral reefs are changing in the face of our climate crisis. She is passionate about collaborative big data to reveal new solutions for coral reef conservation, and works with partners throughout Melanesia, the Coral Triangle, the Western Indian Ocean and the Caribbean.

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Sheryl Fink

Trained as a wildlife biologist, Sheryl is currently the Director of Canadian Wildlife Campaigns for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, where she works to protect seals and other wild species from commercial exploitation and habitat loss. She has led IFAW’s team to the ice floes off Eastern Canada to witness the commercial seal hunt for 12 years, and is the author of “Loss of Habitat: Impacts on Pinnipeds and their Welfare”.

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Patrick Ramage

Patrick Ramage has advised major companies and testified before the United States Congress, all with one goal in mind: to rescue whales.

Under his leadership, IFAW has been at the forefront of worldwide efforts to reduce ocean noise, mitigate disruptive shipping routes, and end commercial whaling. Patrick has helped call out indefensible whaling practices in Iceland, Norway and Japan, and helped shift petroleum company construction in Russia away from the Western Gray Whale’s nursing grounds. By maintaining strategic partnerships and open dialogues with leading scientists, government officials, industry executives, media representatives, mariners, fishermen, and shipping organizations, Patrick is advancing practical solutions to the most urgent threats against whales.

Patrick has worked with IFAW for more than two decades, leading more than a dozen delegations to the International Whaling Commission. He has represented IFAW at the Arctic Council, and the World Trade Organization, and served as an NGO delegate to the UN Conference on Environment and Development, and the UN Conference on Population and Development. Early in his career, Patrick completed Survival, Evasion, Resistance to Interrogation and Escape (SERE) training with the British Special Air Service (SAS).

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Rachel Graham

Dr. Rachel Graham is a conservation scientist with over 27 years of experience in development, research and conservation projects in Latin America, Africa and Oceania. As the Founder and Executive Director of
MarAlliance Rachel is dedicated to inclusive research and conservation of large marine wildlife with coastal communities. Her work has led to conservation and policy wins and in 2011, she won the Whitley Fund for Nature Gold Award for her work with sharks and communities.

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Megha Agrawal Sood

Megha believes in the power of sharing stories and building unexpected collaborations to inspire action. As Director of Programs at Exposure Labs (Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral), she is constantly experimenting with creative storytelling approaches to engage new audiences and amplify climate campaigns. She pulls from her prior experiences in design thinking and social enterprise strategy to craft new film for impact programs.

Prior to joining Exposure Labs, Megha worked at the global innovation firm, IDEO, where she helped purpose-driven organizations grow through human-centered design. She holds a B.S. in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University. When she is not devouring all the latest articles, you can find Megha exploring trails or tracking down the best ice cream with her pup in Boulder, Colorado.

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Aimee Leslie

Aimée is Director of WWF-Peru’s Marine Program and Cetacean and Marine Turtle Bycatch Leader for the network. She has a Master in Environmental Management from Costa Rica and a Master in Education for Sustainable Development from Spain, and she is currently a PhD candidate in Leadership and Sustainability with the University of Lancaster and Cumbria in United Kingdom.

Aimée has worked with WWF for over 8 years, leading the global efforts to reduce threats to marine turtles and cetaceans ranging from illegal take, climate change, habitat reduction, and ship strikes; but today she focuses on the greatest threat to these species in present time, bycatch. Entanglement in fishing gear kills hundeds of thousands, if not millions of these marine flagships a year. WWF is focusing efforts on technology development, capacity building, monitoring, and raising awareness.

She oversees WWF-Peru’s Marine Program, working towards making some of the most significant fisheries in the world (anchoveta, mahi mahi, and giant squid) more sustainable through traceability, fisheries improvement projects, strengthening governance and participation processes, and using the collaborative fisheries research approach to tie conservation efforts to livelihood improvements.

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Hugh Pearson

Hugh is a world leader at producing and directing ocean wildlife films and is one of the most experienced and respected in the business. Hugh worked at the BBC Natural History Unit for 17 years on landmark series such as The Blue Planet, Africa and Nature’s Great Events before moving to Silverback Films where he produced two episodes of The Hunt for BBC Worldwide. Most recently Hugh produced and directed the Coastal Seas and High Seas episodes of Our Planet, a major new series for Netflix.
Hugh’s films are among the most memorable ocean films and have been highly awarded by EMMY, BAFTA, Jackson Wildlife Film Festival, Royal Television Society and Missoula International Wildlife Festival.
With a First Class degree in Marine Biology and two decades filming at sea Hugh has a deep understanding and passion for telling new and engaging stories from above and beneath the waves, as well as communicating the many challenges facing the health of our seas.

Websites:

Oceanic Films Website

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Peter Girguis

Peter Girguis is a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His lab research focuses on microbes and animals that flourish in so-called “extreme environments”. His research is highly interdisciplinary, as he also builds novel instruments and samplers for use on HOVs, ROVs, and AUVs –such as underwater mass spectrometers and microbial samplers- for use in the deep sea.

Prof. Girguis received his B.Sc. from U.C.L.A. and his Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara. He did postdoctoral research at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute before coming to Harvard University.

Girguis has authored or co-authored over 85 publications in journals such as Nature, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Girguis served as chair of the National Deep Submergence Science Committee (DeSSC) from 2010-2016, and is now on several notable ocean advisory boards.

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Katie Carpenter

Katie Carpenter is an award-winning documentary filmmaker specializing in environmental stories. She recently produced “Ocean Warriors” for Animal Planet, “Chasing the Thunder” for Vulcan, and two National Geographic specials for PBS, “Battle for the Elephants” and “Warlords of Ivory”, among others. She has taught wildlife documentary filmmaking for Princeton at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, and serves as a Research Fellow at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, conducting research into media and polarization, focusing on climate change and marine conservation.

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Erick Higuera

Erick Higuera is an award-winning underwater filmmaker, photographer and marine biologist exploring for over 20 years the waters of Guadalupe Island, the Sea of Cortes and the Archipelago of Revillagigedo filming and photographing great white sharks, whales, dolphins, sailfish and other spectacles in the deep blue off Mexico's Pacific shores.

His work has appeared on Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Shark Week, BBC, Shark BBC, BBC Blue Planet II, BBC Blue Planet Live, Our Planet/WWF. Mr Higuera is one of the principal image makers for Pelagic Life whose catalog is filled with amazing images of some of the ocean’s largest inhabitants. He’s also a marine scientist and one of the principal leaders of MANTA PACIFICO whose mission is to lead scientific research of the Oceanic Manta Ray in the Gulf of California and the Revillagigedo Archipelago.

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Rick Rosenthal

Rick Rosenthal is a four-time Emmy, and BAFTA award-winning filmmaker, recognized for his cinematography of ocean wildlife. With advanced degrees in marine biology, Rick draws on his scientific expertise to capture extraordinary wildlife behavior on camera.

Rick was a trail-blazer filming in the open ocean – the waters far from land and thousands of feet deep. Over the years, he has filmed some of most challenging marine wildlife subjects on our planet. Among his achievements are three award-winning programs on the great whales – Riddle of the Right Whale, Humpback Whales and Sperm Whales - Back From the Abyss for BBC, and WHALE WISDOM, produced by Wild Logic for Terra Mater. All four programs were made in collaboration with Sir David Attenborough.

Beginning his career as a marine biologist at California’s Westinghouse Ocean Research Laboratory and then at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Rick left the warm weather behind for the adventures of Alaska. With colleagues, he pioneered underwater research along Alaska’s remote outer coast. Rick has authored and published more than 45 scientific papers and popular articles on marine biology, ecology and animal behavior.
Underwater camerawork played an essential part in Rick’s marine research. Aiming to share his observations with the wider world, Rick turned from research to filmmaking.
Rick’s most recent work is the ground-breaking WHALE WISDOM, which captures previously unrecorded whale behavior, and offers tantalizing clues about their intelligence.

When he’s not in the water, Rick gives presentations, talks and interviews about the subjects of his films and the challenges now facing our planet’s oceans.

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Nicola Brown

Nicola has worked on a variety of productions including Webby Award winning digital series Our Blue Planet with BBC Earth and OceanX Media; BBC Earth’s VR collaboration with Oculus; All4 adventure series Helluva Tour; original BBC/ YouTube series Earth Unplugged; BBC Earth’s Sega Orbi; landmark BBC television series Human Planet and music documentaries for BBC Four.

Nicola's most recent project Our Blue Planet VR for BBC Earth set out to give viewers a dive experience in 6K 3D 360. Putting them face to face with Oceanic manta rays in Mexico's Revillagigedo National Park and surrounded by the green seas of Canada's Browning Pass.

Over the past two years Nicola produced the BBC Earth/OceanX Media digital series Our Blue Planet alongside Blue Planet II - the first project of its kind to run alongside a BBC landmark. Our Blue Planet aimed to engage one billion people in ocean stories across digital platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. The project adopted innovative approaches to natural history storytelling via Facebook Live, 360 video, YouTube shorts, Instagram posts, tweets, articles and social videos. Reaching new audiences and aiming to continue the legacy of the series by inspiring online conversations around ocean conservation.

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Sarah Joseph

Filmmaker and wildlife biologist Dr. Sarah Joseph has traveled the world making films on subjects ranging from 3D-scanning a Sumatran rhino to uncovering mummies in Peru. As a senior producer for the National Geographic Society's storytelling team, Sarah helps create films that highlight the work of National Geographic grantees around the world. She is passionate about fostering diverse perspectives in media and empowering the next generation of storytellers through presentations and workshops.

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Jeff Flocken

Jeffrey Flocken is the President of Humane Society International where he leads a team fighting for all animals around the world. Before this appointment, Flocken worked as the North American Regional Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Flocken is also the founder and board co-chair of the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders initiative and is the coauthor of the book Wildlife Heroes.

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Ludovic Burns Tuki

Ludovic Burns Tuki is the Executive Director of the community based organization known as Te Mau o te Vaikava o Rapa Nu, that focuses on marine conservation in Rapa Nui. His origin is from Paumotu and Rapa Nui island, he is passionate about the sea and nature, and is certified as a PADI dive master. He is recognized in Rapa Nui for his contribution to the preservation of the social, cultural and traditions of his native land. Ludovic served as the Executive Secretary of the Rapa Nui Public-Private Council and also as the Executive Director of the Mesa del Mar, which worked tirelessly for the creation of the marine protected area of Rapa Nui signed on June 8 2018, that allows ancestral artisanal and sport fishing to be protected with sustainable practices, leaving a legacy for future generations.

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Sarah Fowler

Sarah Fowler has a First class BSc in Marine Zoology and an MSc in Conservation. She has worked for 40 years in marine biodiversity conservation for governments, national and international NGOs, UN organisations and foundations.

Sarah was the IUCN Shark Specialist Group’s Deputy Chair, Acting Chair and Co-chair for 18 years from 1991. She led the first global chondrichthyan IUCN Red List Assessment, completed in 2009, and headed the SSG’s input to CITES, CMS and other multilateral environmental and fisheries bodies for over 20 years. She continues working in this field. Sarah founded the European Elasmobranch Association and the UK Shark Trust. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to marine conservation in 2004 and a Pew Marine Fellow in 2005.

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Meaghan Brosnan

Meaghan oversees all aspects of WildAid’s Marine Protection work, and is currently focused on expanding the program globally. Meaghan has worked for over 15 years to reduce illegal fishing around the world in roles ranging from law enforcement officer in the U.S. Coast Guard to independent consultant and advisor to senior government leaders.

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Andre Boustany

Andre Boustany is the Principal Investigator of Fisheries in the Conservation Research Department at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Before coming to the Aquarium, Andre was a research scientist at Duke University where he studied pelagic fish and fisheries, looking at ways to improve stock assessments, reduce bycatch, and improve fisheries management. He also serves on several advisory committees, advising federal fisheries regulators on domestic and international management of pelagic fisheries.

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Stéphanie Jenouvrier

Dr. Stéphanie Jenouvrier is an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA) and Centre d’études Biologiques de Chizé (France). She is interested in understanding and predicting the effect of climate change on life-history and population dynamics of seabirds living in the Southern Ocean. Her work combines analysis of long-term ecological data with climate projections and mathematical modelling. She also conducted several field seasons in Antarctica and sub-Antarctic Islands.

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Ania Trzebiatowska

Ania Trzebiatowska is a programmer for the Sundance Film Festival, focusing on US and World documentary features. Most recently, she was the Sales & Acquisitions Executive for doc sales agency, Autlook Filmsales. Prior to that she was with the NYC-based agency, Visit Films, where she served as Senior Director of Acquisitions since 2015. Aside from her work at Sundance, Ania is also the artistic director of Off Camera IFF (Krakow, Poland), which she has been programming since 2008. She trained in production and post-production at the BBC and the British Museum, and holds a Master’s degree in film studies as well as an M.A in Digital Culture and Technology.

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Alex Kerr

Alex Kerr is an intellectual property attorney whose practice centers on copyright and trademark. Alex has in-depth experience in all aspects of copyright law, including licensing, registering copyrights, advising copyright owners, and infringement litigation. Before launching his own firm, Alex Kerr Law LLC, Alex was a partner at Harmon Seidman & Bruss, the premier copyright litigation law firm for photographers and stock photography agencies. For nearly ten years, Alex has represented world-renowned photographers in meritorious copyright infringement claims against major U.S. textbook publishers. Alex holds a J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law (2009), and a B.A. from Amherst College (2003, magna cum laude). Alex is a member of the California, Colorado, and Wyoming Bars. Alex grew up in western Colorado and moved to Jackson Hole in 2013 for all the obvious reasons.

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Mary Hagedorn

Dr. Mary Hagedorn received her Ph.D. in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is a Senior Research Scientist at the Smithsonian Institution. She has worked in aquatic ecosystems around the world from the Amazon to Africa, has taught many university-level classes, lectures frequently to lay audiences, maintains an active laboratory with graduate students and post docs, and is a successful researcher and active grant writer. In the past years, she has received several multi-million dollar research grants from government agencies and foundations to support her research and has collaborators in over 30 institutions throughout the world. In 2000, she received the prestigious George E. Burch Fellowship in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Theoretic Sciences, in 2005 she was nominated for the Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation and was a 2012 finalist for the Rolex Award for Enterprise. Dr. Hagedorn has created the first genome repository for endangered coral species in the Caribbean, Hawaii and The Great Barrier Reef and has distributed this germplasm to frozen banks around the world. Today, she is the Director of MarineGEO Hawaii, a global near-shore long-term monitoring program.

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Andrew Venter

Andrew has been the CEO of the Wildlands Conservation Trust (WILDTRUST) since 2004, leading it from a small regional NGO to one of South Arica’s largest NGO’s, supporting a number of pro-poor environmental interventions through its WILDLANDS and WILDOCEANS programs – www.wildtrust.co.za. His first film project was the acclaimed BLOOD LIONS documentary (2015) – www.bloodlions.org, which profiled South Africa’s insidious and unethical lion industry. His insights gained as Executive Producer and one of the campaign leads highlighted the potential power of environmental-film making as an awareness, education and advocacy tool. In 2016, he initiated the WILDOCEANS Program, recognizing the need for a holistic regionally based marine conservation program that supports the effective conservation of the south west Indian Ocean. Andrew’s latest project is as the Executive Producer of the film - OUR OCEANS – www.ouroceansfilm.com, which profiles the incredible biodiversity of this region, and the scientists and future leaders looking to protect it.

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Ted Richane

Ted is a social change, strategy and communications professional with 20+ years of experience designing and managing political, advocacy and social marketing campaigns. As engagement and impact director at Vulcan Productions, he oversees the company’s partnerships, outreach and issue campaigns, working with film producers, creative agencies, policy experts and leading advocates across numerous social issues. With deep experiences in climate change, conservation, public health and human rights, Ted is an expert on deploying film, television and other media properties for social change.

Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Ted spent eight years in Washington, DC working in strategic communications, and also worked on numerous political campaigns, both for national candidates and major political organizations.

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Shane Moore

Shane Moore has been filming wildlife for more than three decades. His clients have included the BBC, Discovery Channel and Disney. He considers the opportunity to film snow leopards the highlight of his career. He has been the DP on the chase boat for Deadliest Catch for the past eight years and has extensive experience at getting stable shots in unsteady environments.

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Caroline Smith

Caroline Smith is the Chief Content Officer at Seeker, an award-winning Group Nine Media brand. Seeker explains the world through a lens of science, bringing to light how science impacts our lives and shapes our future. With 175 million monthly video views, Seeker is one of the most-viewed, most-engaged science and tech brands on social. In her role, Caroline oversees all content development, production and audience growth.

Prior to Group Nine, Caroline ran the branded entertainment department for Discovery Communications’ digital native brands, building an award-winning production unit from scratch. Caroline began her career in magazine publishing, developing cross-platform content marketing campaigns for leading advertisers at Meredith Corporation.

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David Kroodsma

David Kroodsma leads Global Fishing Watch’s Research Program, which is a collaboration between Global Fishing Watch and a network of over 10 research institutions. He is responsible for leading and facilitating new research projects, and he works with the Global Fishing Watch engineering team to develop new technologies. David has over a decade and a half of experience working with NGOs and researchers to address global environmental challenges. He has a B.S. in physics and an M.S. in earth systems science from Stanford University. He is the winner of the 2019 Blue Marine Foundation Science Award for leading the first global assessment of fishing activity using vessel tracking data.

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Grant Collins

Grant Collins advises Circulate Capital, an impact-focused investment manager, on developing and implementing its strategy for investing in waste management and recycling companies and projects in South and Southeast Asia. His research in several Asian countries that contribute significantly to ocean plastic debris underpinned the formation of Circulate Capital’s Ocean Fund, the first investment vehicle dedicated to investing in order to remediate the leakage of plastic to the world’s ocean.

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Ayana Young

Ayana Young is an American podcast and radio personality specializing in intersectional environmental and social justice, deep ecology and land-based restoration. With an undergraduate degree from Loyola Marymount University including a double major in Art History and Theology and a minor in Philosophy as well as education through Columbia University in Ecology and Eastern Religions and Restoration Ecology at the University of Victoria, Young has a strong academic background at the intersections of ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Post-graduation dividends, from her early career allowed Young to conserve 500 acres of coast redwood and salmon habitat in Northern California, where she has been living for over five years. Living for the first years, in a tent with no electricity or running water while she established a homestead, and broke ground on a native species nursery and research center.

A budding filmmaker, Young is no stranger to the medium having spent her childhood as a prolific working actor, working alongside the likes of Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep. Young’s debut film, When Old Growth Ends is an ode to the complex interweaving of the irreplaceable Tongass National Forest during its last stand as a distinctly wild place in Southeast Alaska. As Director, Producer, Narrator and Featured Cast Member of the film, Young wore many hats in midwifing this compelling and poetic story of struggle and beauty surrounding the Tongass National Forest.

Young leans into her vast experience on the other side of the camera, along with her intersectional approach to ecological restoration to guide her process as the Founder and Executive Director of millennial media organization and nonprofit For The Wild. Learning deeply from the critical dialogue she’s shared with over 100 guests on the For The Wild podcast, including Sylvia Earle, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, Paul Watson, Dune Lankard, Winona La Duke, Terry Tempest Williams and other thought leaders (including some of the brightest activists, political thinkers, and scientific minds of our time). Young approaches her mission with For The Wild with critical thinking, deep reverence and artistry.

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Danielle Steinberg

Danielle Steinberg is currently the digital lead for PBS Nature. She was most recently a senior producer running the video teams for Gizmodo and Earther. Before that, she was a founding member of PBS Digital Studios, PBS' original digital network of educational series, where she began her career. and
was a producer for National Geographic, also contributing to Nat Geo's first digital series, all with a focus on science, conservation, exploration, wildlife, and the environment.

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Brandon Southall

Dr. Brandon Southall is an ocean bioacoustician with over 25 years of experience studying how marine mammals use sound, how they can be harmed by human noise, and what we can do to reduce noise impacts. He served as the head of NOAA’s Ocean Acoustics Program in Washington DC during a formative time and then co-founded Southall Environmental Associates, a small research business in Monterey Bay, CA. He also helped start and supports a new non-profit called California Ocean Alliance dedicated to hands-on education, conservation, and research partnerships to inspire and enable the next generation of scientists and conservationists.

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Kyle McBurnie

Kyle McBurnie is a filmmaker and underwater cameraman. Best known for his work in the California ocean, Kyle has shot for the BBC, Discovery Channel, National Geographic and others. His underwater photography has been published in National Geographic Magazine and he is a National Geographic Explorer. Kyle is also a co-founder of Diatom Studios, a natural history production company in San Diego, as well as SD Expeditions, an adventure company specializing in cageless shark diving experiences. He is an AAUS certified scientific diver active with Scripps, and a USCG licensed 100-ton captain.

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Sally Snow

Sally Snow is a Zoologist and Filmmaker. She is an Executive Directors for the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines the largest non- government organization dedicated to the conservation of marine megafauna and the marine environment in the Philippines. A passionate science communicator she has worked with the BBC, National Geographic, S4C and PTS in diverse roles from associate producer, undercover filmmaker, self-shooting presenter and fixer for blue-chip series. She believes in conservation filmmaking as a tool for behavioural change and delivering stories that connect both people and the environment. She is a two-time grantee of the Conservation Media Group who champion impact media.

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Charles Thorp

Charles Thorp is a contributing writer to a few of the world’s most recognizable lifestyle publications with bylines including Men’s Journal, Uproxx, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Pursuits, New York Magazine, and Runner’s World. He is host of travel podcast "Great Adventures", which features the world's most recognizable names speaking on how travel and adventure shaped their careers. He has moderated panel discussions on behalf of Build Series, Apple, National Geographic, ESPN and BAFTA.

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Gavin Boyland

As Head of Development Gavin leads the creative ideas process across the Natural History Unit’s entire portfolio. As an award-winning producer he has a wealth of experience making shows for both the BBC and the independent sector, from filming mountain gorillas with Sigourney Weaver to chasing mammoths across Siberia. His recent Series Producer credits include Animal Babies, Big Cats and Primates.

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Orla Doherty

Orla spent ten years at sea studying the remote coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean with a coral reef NGO, having previously produced popular factual television from Channel 4’s Grand Designs to BBC’s Don’t Look Down with Kevin McCloud. She joined the Natural History Unit in October 2013 as the Development Producer to help give shape to Blue Planet II. Since then, she has spent 500 hours at depths of 1,000 metres in three oceans as Producer of The Deep episode and filmed scientists at the frontline of ocean discovery from Indonesia to the Arctic Circle as Producer of Our Blue Planet episode. She is now co-Executive Producer on Mission OceanX, a series combining landmark blue chip natural history with the thrill and drama of ocean exploration. It is a BBC Studios/OceanX Media co-production for National Geographic, to be executive produced by Orla and Roger Webb from the NHU and filmmaker/ocean explorer James Cameron.

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Mark Brownlow

Mark is a multiple Bafta and Emmy award-winning executive producer with over 20 years of experience across a broad range of wildlife TV documentaries. In addition to Earth’s Tropical Islands (BBC/PBS), he is executive producer of the forthcoming Frozen Planet II (BBC/BBC America). Mark was series producer on the highly acclaimed Blue Planet II (BBC/BBC America), and co-directed its accompanying 3D giant screen production Oceans: Our Blue Planet, now on general release worldwide. Not only was he series producer of the ground breaking Hidden Kingdoms series (BBC/Discovery Channel), he also directed and produced the award-winning Tiny Giants 3D, the most successful BBC Earth giant screen to date. His producer credits include Planet Earth, South Pacific and Inside the Perfect Predator.

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Lee Bacon

Lee Bacon is the Head of Digital and Shortform at the BBC Natural History Unit where he oversees the production of social content for titles such as Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, Dynasties and the upcoming Seven Worlds, One Planet. His team is also responsible for developing and producing innovative short form content and campaigns for commercial partners such as Google, Quibi and OceanX. He has previously produced digital-first series for global titles such as Doctor Who, Top Gear and American Idol.

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Jonny Keeling

Jonny Keeling is the executive producer of Seven Worlds - One Planet. He's worked at the BBC Natural History Unit for 23 years where he has produced, directed, series produced and exec produced across various wildlife series and documentaries including Planet Earth, Planet Earth II, The Life of Mammals, Mountain gorilla, The Natural World, Wildlife on One, Lost Land of the Volcano and Lost Land of the Tiger.

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Monica Hayes

Monica leads the global marketing strategy for the amazing award-winning Natural History and Science content, experiences and interactions, across multiple platforms. This includes leading the marketing for key landmarks such as Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II encompassing on-air promotion, digital marketing, social engagement and third party partnerships. As part of this she spearheads the development and implementation of BBC Earth’s brand strategy to drive and sustain brand leadership.
Prior to BBC Studios Monica built over 20 years of marketing experience working with blue chip international brands. She joined BBC Studios from British Airways, where she was Global Marketing Manager, based in London with an international remit. Her previous experience encompasses launching and developing the Oneworld airline alliance across 8 international airlines and the re-launch of the Executive Club from 5 regional programmes to a single global programme.

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Tim Shank

Tim Shank is an Associate Scientist and Director of the HADEX Program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research combines genomic and ecological studies to understand adaptions of life and human impacts in the deep ocean. He has conducted more than 70 scientific expeditions, more than 50 dives in the submarine Alvin, and more than 500 dives with remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), including the first use of a hybrid ROV (Nereus) in the deepest trenches. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers, and a best-seller book “Discovering the Deep”.

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Christopher Clark

Christopher W. Clark, a biologist and engineer, is the founding Director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Imogene Johnson Senior Scientist and Graduate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Cornell University. Dr. Clark has a long history of successfully working at the interface between science, applied engineering, industry, and regulations; all with the specific objectives of using science to understand the potential impacts of human activities on marine mammals and to inspire and enable the scientific conservation of marine wildlife and habitats. Dr. Clark was the Chief Marine Mammal Scientist for the U. S. Navy’s Whales ’93 dual-uses program, co-PI for the Low-Frequency Active Scientific Research Program, and co-PI investigating the impacts of the Navy’s mid-frequency active sonar on beaked whales. He lead the development and application of the near-real-time, auto-detection network for North Atlantic right whale acoustic monitoring in Boston shipping lanes (http://admin.nrwbuoys.org/, http://www.listenforwhales.org/). He has published over 300 papers and presentations, and more recently devoted considerable effort to scientific advocacy through documentary films, such as Racing Extinction (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvPP4lvhqUY) and Sonic Sea (http://www.sonicsea.org/), and outreach (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHW77blulg&t=878s).

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Maryanne Culpepper

Maryanne Culpepper is an award-winning writer/filmmaker with extensive experience in developing, writing and producing documentary and nonfiction series. She is the former President of National Geographic Studios and served as the Executive Director of the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital . Maryanne is developing creative content with UPROAR, a global mobile media platform and community enabling individuals to make a difference in the world, as well as writing and producing for international science museum exhibitions. She is a guest lecturer at George Washington University, an affiliate of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), and a member of the Producers Guild of America (PGA)

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Elisabeth Kruger

Elisabeth Kruger, Senior Program Officer, Arctic Wildlife
Elisabeth works at the forefront of Arctic conservation, applying science-based conservation to help maintain healthy ecosystems in a changing Arctic. Elisabeth strives to increase understanding of ecosystems and to ensure continuing coexistence of wildlife and the people who live as part of the Arctic ecosystem.
Prior to joining WWF, Elisabeth relocated to Russia as a Fulbright scholar, landing in Irkutsk, where she spent the next four years immersed in the culture and ecology of Siberia. In 2011, Elisabeth moved to Alaska, which she now considers home. She leads WWF’s polar bear conservation work in the Alaskan Arctic.

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Taylor Rees

A filmmaker and photojournalist, Taylor Rees is driven by an insatiable curiosity to explore and tell the stories beneath the surface. She infuses her passion for adventure into her work around environmental and humanitarian issues, bringing new perspectives and deeper public understanding to challenging topics such as climate change, energy, food sovereignty, conservation and extractive industries. Her filmmaking in these fields has centered around natural resource conflicts, humanity, and adventures in Alaska, Greenland, Haiti, Nepal, Congo, Russia, Mexico, Iceland, Chile, the deserts of the Southwest, and throughout the Rocky Mountains. She served as the Program Director of the Yale Environmental Film Festival and holds a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry in environmental anthropology and film.

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Claudia Zenkert

Claudia Zenkert is a multi-award-winning producer and Head of Science and Nature at taglicht media. She is responsible for the development and financing of documentary series, one-offs and formats for the German and international market. Within taglicht media’s portfolio, Claudia is mainly focused on science, natural history and the set-up and development of a new scripted department.

For taglicht media, Claudia produced the award-winning Naked Mole Rat – Nature’s Weirdest Superhero (ZDF/arte, Nat Geo Channels, Smithsonian Channel) and Mystery in Yellowstone (arte, WDR, Smithsonian Channel). Since the beginning of 2018, Claudia is part of the Managing Director Team focusing on strategic development and financing.

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John Rubin

HHMI Tangled Bank Studios is a mission-driven production company established and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as an extension of its longstanding commitment to science education. HHMI is the largest private nonprofit supporter of science education and biomedical research in the United States. HHMI Tangled Bank Studios crafts compelling, immersive films about science and scientists for broadcast, theatrical and digital distribution. The company’s award-winning programs address important contemporary issues and capture inspirational stories of discovery across all branches of scientific inquiry. For more information, please visit www.tangledbankstudios.org and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

John Rubin is executive producer at HHMI Tangled Bank Studios. Rubin, winner of a Peabody and four Emmys, turned to documentaries after completing his doctorate in cognitive science at MIT. He has produced, written and directed films for the flagship PBS series Nature, American Experience, and NOVA. At Tangled Bank, Rubin executive-produced The Farthest, a feature doc about the heroic Voyager space mission. A selection of the Tribeca Film Festival, the film won the 2018 Emmy for Outstanding Science and Technology documentary, the National Academies’ Keck Communication Award, and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism award.

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Madelsar Ngiraingas

Madelsar is currently OneReef’s Micronesia Community Partnerships Manager. She helps to manage and strengthen community partnerships with diverse stakeholders who similarly value the importance of coral reefs and their role for Pacific Island communities. She was born and raised in the Republic of Palau and has extensive experience in community-based non-profit organizations that primarily focus on gender issues, women’s empowerment, youth development, environmental conservation, and tourism. Madelsar has two B.A. degrees in History & Women’s Studies from Washington State University, and an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Professionally, she has been an educator for nearly 15 years and has served in various capacities on matters related to climate change, sustainable land management, historical/cultural preservation, tourism coordination, food security, integrated farming, and policy development.

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Sheila Hemami

Sheila Hemami is Draper’s Director of Strategic Technical Opportunities and joined the organization to launch its Global Challenges initiative in 2016 - applying Draper's advanced engineering capabilities and expertise to challenges for humankind and the planet. She has built an environment- and conservation-oriented portfolio with a broad range of cross-sector partners. Current projects include coral conservation, microplastic measurement, and counting hippos from space. In her previous life, she was a professor of electrical engineering and traveled the world while creating operational models of the human visual system to design better digital imaging systems.

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Isaac Jones

Isaac Jones is a composer and sound designer based in Brooklyn, NY. He works full-time as a Technical Producer at WNYC Studios, creating new sonic identities for podcasts. A typical week may call for a slapstick comedy sequence on Monday, a naturalistic underwater soundscape on Tuesday, and original music from disco to garage rock to neoclassical Wednesday through Friday. Transom has called Jones' sound design for the show 10 Things That Scare Me "groundbreaking... [and] convention-busting." Aside from his career in podcasting, Jones composes music for film, theater, and visual art. His recent work with multimedia artist Rachel Rose was installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. Jones completed the score and sound design for National Geographic's short documentary on pangolin conservation work in Nigeria, which is a finalist in two categories.

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Suwanna Gauntlett

Is at the forefront of endangered species conservation. Working directly in their wild habitat, she has saved the Asian elephant of Cambodia’s Southwest Elephant Corridor, the Olive Ridley turtle of the Orissa Coast of India, and was on the team that saved the Siberian tiger from the brink of extinction in the Russian Far-East in the 1990s. Has twenty two years of experience in strengthening parks and reserves around the world, combatting the illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia, and rescuing thousands of trafficked animals.

Has a proven track-record in saving threatened rainforests by stopping deforestation and wildlife poaching. Her model is threat-based, practical and comprehensive, tackles conservation problems directly on the ground: organizes ranger forces, monitors good governance, works with communities, develops jobs, builds political will at all levels.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Wildlife Alliance. Created the Wildlife Alliance Cambodia Conservation Program and manages directly its 8 field programs. Lives in Cambodia for the last 19 years.

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Sandy Hessler

Sandy’s passion is to help people and teams catalyze the power within for maximum health, growth and success. She has over 30 years experience in business from blue chips to start ups along with a lifetime of study on human potential and consciousness.

She began her career in brand management at Procter & Gamble, then cofounded a start up called Imagitas which sold to Pitney Bowes in 2005 for $265 million. She has taught leadership, communications and marketing at Tufts, Miami of Ohio and Harvard Kennedy School where she served as Assistant Dean, running the office of career advancement, field experience and internships for students. For the last six years she has co-created and taught the Start Up Intensive—a 20-week intensive entrepreneurial training program in Jackson Wyoming through Central Wyoming College—while also doing private leadership coaching and consulting. She has her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, and advanced degrees from Harvard, Miami of Ohio and the University of Santa Monica.

Whether she’s running a brand, climbing the world’s tallest mountains, raising five beloved children, teaching, or co-founding a start-up, Sandy lives her life joyfully and intentionally.

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Carlyn Staudt

Carlyn Staudt is Executive Vice President, Love Nature programming and development at Blue Ant Media. She is responsible for leading the global programming strategy of Love Nature’s linear and streaming video platforms internationally, with the exception of North America. Her role also includes commissioning original content to grow the brand’s extensive library of 4K natural history programming. Working out of Washington, D.C., Staudt is building and leading a team in the areas of development and production to support Love Nature’s expansion.

Prior to joining Blue Ant Media, Staudt worked at National Geographic Partners as SVP, global content partnerships and strategic development. In this role, she was responsible for managing the company’s relationship with Fox Home Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Film & Television Distribution. In addition, she managed Cinema Ventures, National Geographic’s large-format film business and digital content syndication opportunities. Staudt also held numerous leadership roles within the company, notably SVP, global programming and managing director, National Geographic Channels, International Operations.

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Alison Barrat

In her role as VP, Production & Development, Love Nature, Alison Barrat provides creative leadership on new projects for Love Nature’s growing slate and is responsible for executing programming strategies for the brand’s international channels through development and production. She serves as the main point of creative contact for both in-house and independent production companies. Barrat is a multi-award and Emmy winning film professional with over 20 years experience in natural history film production. Prior to Love Nature she launched a specialist wildlife film production unit at the Living Oceans Foundation where she executive produced films for PBS, the Smithsonian Channel and Curiositystream. Over the last two decades she has written, produced, and directed natural history and science documentaries and series for National Geographic Channel, Discovery Communications, and PBS. Barrat’s experience also includes leadership roles in development and production with National Geographic Television.

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Fred Kaufman

For more than 25 years, Fred Kaufman has been a leading executive in the natural history genre. As the executive producer of the acclaimed PBS Nature series, Kaufman has won seven Emmys and two Peabody Awards. He has been with Nature since its beginning in 1982 and has overseen it since 1991. During his tenure, Nature has been honored with hundreds of industry awards. In 2012, Kaufman was named the recipient of the International Wildlife Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Media. In 2010, he accepted the Outstanding Achievement Award from the prestigious Wildscreen Festival in Bristol, England. It was the first time in the 20-year history of the festival that the award was presented to an American wildlife series. Kaufman is a member of the Writers Guild of America and a board member of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and the Bronx Children’s Museum. He appears regularly on public television fundraising drives as a spokesman for quality natural history television.

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Matt Morales

Matt Morales is a development producer at Seeker -- the no. 1 most-engaged science publisher on social in the world. In his current role, Matt leads the team in visual ideation, scripting, animating and editing for all new programming on both digital and linear platforms. While at Seeker, Matt has produced hundreds of videos that have generated millions of views across platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, TikTok and more.

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Aneeta Akhurst

Aneeta Akhurst is the Director of Programming at Seeker, an award-winning science digital media brand, delivering over 2 billion annual video views and ranking #1 in scale and engagement on social. Seeker empowers the curious to understand how science shapes their world, and celebrates relentless curiosity with an insatiable drive to question, inspire, and create. In her role, Aneeta oversees all original programming and production, spanning best-in-class documentaries, science news and hosted explainer series that air across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon and linear. In addition to her work with Seeker, Aneeta has over ten years of experience working on short-form digital, and long-form broadcast productions for Discovery, The BBC, National Geographic and PBS.

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Faith Musembi

Faith is an award winning visual storyteller, with a deep and abiding love for motion pictures, writing and nature. Since obtaining a Master of Arts in the Visual Media Arts from Emerson College, she has crafted a few films including Underwater Treasures and Salt Water Survivors for the award winning Giving Nature A Voice series. These films educate about conservation, but also spark discussions about balanced conservation efforts between the Kenyan government, non-government organizations and local communities. In addition to her background in documentary work, Faith spent a year and a half working as a live TV Broadcast Director for Wild Earth in the Maasai Mara and at Djuma Private Game Reserve in the Greater Kruger National Park. Living in the wild has confirmed her commitment and passion for telling stories about wilderness areas, and also for inspiring local communities to share their own narratives.

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Rodrigo Farias

Rodrigo grew up exploring and documenting much of the beautiful Chilean coastline and the surf scene in the last decade, filming, traveling and working with environmental surfer Ramon Navarro. He highlights the spirit of surfing, tells stories of the coast, loves the ocean, and is aware that we must protect and take care for it. His mission is to communicate the sea culture that surrounds this sport, which has led him to be the Parley for the Oceans Chile director and works to raise awareness about the beauty and fragility of our oceans. Together with his team, they have managed to carry out more than 150 beach cleanups, with more than 3,000 volunteers and work in more than 30 locations nationwide.

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Malaika Vaz

Malaika is a 22-year-old National Geographic Explorer, Wildlife Presenter and Filmmaker. As a Nat Geo Explorer, Malaika just finished presenting and directing a 3-part film series on community-led coexistence with Asiatic Lions, Tigers and Leopards in India. She also presented the 8-part Discovery Channel and Animal Planet TV series titled ‘On the Brink’, which focuses on lesser known and endangered species. Malaika is also a PADI Dive Master, Cessna Pilot, National-level windsurfer, sailor and endurance horse rider. She has previously worked to empower disadvantaged women, survivors of violence and tribal children through adventure sports and outdoor education in the Mulshi Valley in Maharashtra. Deeply interested in creating policy impact in the field of wildlife conservation, Malaika works along with leading international and Indian environmental organisations WildAid and the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) on marine trafficking issues in her country.

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Katie Schuler

An advocate for the planet’s most at-risk species, Katie operates at the nexus between science, empathy, and storytelling. More than a decade of filmmaking across six continents has afforded Katie expertise in the field and in the editing room. Using her signature storytelling flair, Katie’s films explore how we live alongside nature, garnering accolades, accruing millions of views, and inspiring meaningful conservation victories. Her production company, Coral & Oak Studios, has partnered with many of the most recognizable names in wildlife filmmaking, including National Geographic, Smithsonian, BBC, HBO, and PBS. Katie’s film, Pangolin, is the winner of six best short awards including Jackson Wild’s 2017 Best Short category. Since its premiere, Pangolin has been translated into four languages, reaching over 75 million people while serving as an important tool for conservation. Two of her latest films, Where Life Begins, and Nigerians Fight to Protect the World’s Most Trafficked Mammal, have been nominated at this year’s festival. Katie is a National Geographic Explorer, a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art and Design, a Henry Luce Fellow, and a member of the International League of a Conservation Photographer’s Emerging League. She currently operates out of Washington, D.C. alongside her husband, Nick, and dog, Bullseye.

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Kathleen Mcinnis

As programmer/curator, creative producer and strategic publicist, Kathleen McInnis provides strategic collaboration with emerging World Cinema filmmakers to merge their creative and business development.
Kathleen helps to expand filmmaker networks, broaden and cultivate audience and raise profile for both the films and filmmakers, starting in development, continuing through production and on to the world premieres at festivals such as Toronto, Sundance, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Karlovy Vary.
Kathleen was Festival Director for the Palm Springs ShortsFest as well as Director of Programming at Aspen Shorts; she launched the International ShortCuts section at TIFF, programmed for Hot Docs and Tribeca, and currently curates the New Work in Progress Forum at the Seattle International Film Festival.
She is co-producing BROADCAST, the debut documentary feature from award-winning filmmakers Axel Danielson and Maximilien van Aertryckm (Ten Meter Tower, 2017) along with Plattform Produktion (Sweden).
Kathleen has served as a mentor for IFFR-Rotterdam’s Cinemart, the Directors Guild of Cyprus, Berlinale Talent Campus, BAL LAB (Buenos Aires), and Creative Europe, and has served on festival juries at Vilinus, Galway, Grimstad (Norwegian Short Film Festival), Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival) and Winterthur International Short Film Festival, among others. She is a qualified international advisor for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development small grant program in film.

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Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner oversees content strategy, development and production for the PBS Primetime schedule in the genres of history, culture, natural history and science. During his time at PBS, projects he commissioned or oversaw have won three Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, a Dupont-Columbia Award, an Imagen Award, an NAACP Image Award and numerous Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and Wildscreen Awards. International co-productions he has developed or commissioned have also earned several BAFTA and Grierson Awards. Before joining PBS in 2012 Gardner spent over a decade in the independent production world, working as director, producer, writer and show runner on projects for multiple global networks, with production experience in over 30 countries. Bill holds a Masters Degree in cultural anthropology and has taught university courses in Arkansas and Marrakech, Morocco.

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Tria Thalman

Tria considers herself one of the lucky ones: someone who knew early in life what she wanted to do and has happily followed that path for 25 years. In her current role she helps develop and oversee a broad slate of wildlife films for Smithsonian Channel US and their international networks. She works with production companies to help shape their films through development and production, and gets deep in the weeds with scriptwriting if needed. But, a producer at heart, she’s happiest when in the field. Before joining Smithsonian Channel she worked as a freelance producer creating content for National Geographic, Discovery, Nat Geo Wild and Animal Planet. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Cambridge and studied film at the University of Bristol before moving to the United States in 1995.

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Gianna Savoie

Gianna Savoie is an award-winning documentary producer, writer, and professor with two decades of experience in Natural History filmmaking and a penchant for powerful storytelling that has led her to sink her teeth into some of the most critical conservation issues on the planet. Trained as an environmental biologist, she pairs her love of science with the art of filmmaking to craft stories that not only inform, but deeply resonate. Her Emmy-nominated work has been featured on PBS, NATURE, National Geographic, Discovery, and the BBC, as well as in theatrical documentaries and in print and web publications.

Dubbed The Mountain Mermaid, Gianna founded the Ocean Media Institute, a non-profit global media collective that serves to enrich and expand the public's engagement in ocean science and conservation through innovative visual media and artistic approaches to ocean education. And in her quest to “pay it forward” and inspire the next generation of environmental storytellers, she teaches in the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

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Stephani Gordon

Stephani Gordon is a marine field biologist turned filmmaker. She has filmed for National Geographic, National Science Foundation projects, United Nations funded work, NOAA, Fish & Wildlife, and a wide variety of other organizations. Sharing the stories of rugged coastlines, rivers, mountains, islands, and their people with the wider world has been the focus of much of her filmmaking, and she is the first to admit it is often a wild and unpredictable ride, equal parts adventure and mishap. She currently works for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in Portland, Oregon, as a cinematographer and editor, as well as working on independent film projects farther afield through her production company Open Boat Films.

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Roshan Patel

Roshan Patel is the media producer at Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, DC. His short films explore topics of wildlife conservation, ranging from the social dynamics of villiagers living with lions in Western India, to reintroduction efforts of critically endangered species. These films often focus on the optimistic solutions to urgent threats facing wildlife and their habitats.

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Vanessa Berlowitz

Vanessa co-founded Wildstar Films with her husband, Mark Linfield, in 2018 after 28 years of running teams and making award winning wildlife films and documentaries. She is currently an Executive Producer on a number of new series for National Geographic Channel and is working on two films with for Disneynature.

Vanessa spent the first 24 years of her career working at the BBC Natural History Unit and made over 15 films for 5 internationally acclaimed, multi-award winning, landmark series – Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Life of Mammals, Land of the Tiger and the Human Animal – as well as for major long-running strands and series such as The Natural World, Wildlife on One, Animal People and Postcards from the Country. The films she has worked on with her teams have been highly awarded by EMMY, BAFTA, RTS, Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, Missoula International Wildlife Festival and Wildscreen. She is an EMMY nominated writer and a BAFTA and Grierson nominated Director.

She won a Primetime EMMY as the Series Producer of Frozen Planet and then went on to become a lead Executive Producer for the BBC, developing, winning and producing Great Bear Stakeout, Life in the Air and Planet Earth 2.

After Vanessa left the BBC, she worked as a Consulting Executive Producer with Nutopia and helped develop the series vision for One Strange Rock. She then teamed up with her husband, Mark Linfield, who she met at Oxford University when studying for her MA in Biology and Anthropology. They moved with their son to Botswana to live in the bush for 2 years to make Elephant for Disneynature.

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Jason Sturgis

Jason Sturgis is an independent cameraman who has been filming wildlife since 2002. He grew up in Gardnerville, Nevada, but spent time on the British Columbia coast and Maui where he learned to dive at age 8. He got his start working for Whale Trust on Maui, Hawai’i, documenting whale behavior both above and below the surface. Jason has been an avid diver for over 25 years and his love of the ocean that led him to pursue camera work and documentary filmmaking. Jason runs his own production company, Open Ocean Productions, and his work has been featured in MacGillivray Freeman IMAX Films, BBC, National Geographic channel, CBC, Animal Planet, Discovery Canada, NDR Germany, Dan Rather Reports, ABC’s Pacific Adventures, and NBC’s Today show. Jason lives with his wife and two daughters.

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Ivo Filatsch

Ivo is Terra Mater Factual Studios’ space cowboy: He is hooked on stars and galaxies, exoplanets and black holes, and to him, the sky is no limit. So, it may come as no surprise that Ivo is a true Science Fiction fan, too.

Not least because of his special interest for topics that are out of this world, Ivo was the Executive Producer for one of Terra Mater Factual Studios’ most successful and prestigious productions to date: the multi-award-winning science TV documentary “David Attenborough’s Light on Earth”, which is diving deep into the seemingly otherworldly realm of bioluminescent creatures.

However, Ivo has also quite a natural down-to-earth approach - especially, when it comes to meteorites that are hitting our planet, or to the amazing spectacle of the Aurora, the polar lights: Ivo was the writer and director of the two respective TMFS productions.

Aside from producing, Ivo is overseeing a lot of blue-chip natural history shows and series, such as “David Attenborough’s Ant Mountain”, “Wild Sri Lanka”, “Sex, Lies, and Butterflies”, “The Sun – Inferno in the Sky”, “Badlands – Hard Rock, Tough Lives”, amongst others.

Being a loving “dad” of two great Maine Coon cat sisters, Ivo has also a very personal connection to big cats; therefore, it’s a privilege and pleasure for him to be the EP for an amazing and ambitious production: the three-part series “Okavango – River of Dreams” is a very special gem in natural history filmmaking, and yet another highlight in TMFS’ extensive and ever-growing catalogue.

Before joining Terra Mater Factual Studios, Ivo worked as an editor, writer and director for the science department of the ORF, Austria's public service broadcaster, for almost two decades. He produced many stories for several science TV magazines and was involved in the development of new programs. He joined the ORF Natural History Unit as an Executive Producer, before leaving to share the TMFS team’s vision.

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Gab Mejia

Gab Mejia is a National Geographic Explorer, conservationist, mountaineer, and emerging storyteller. He has traveled and covered stories on nature from the receding glaciers of Patagonia for the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, to the critically-endangered dwarf buffalos for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). He is an avid adventurer and mountaineer, having scaled mountains across different continents from Northern Africa all the way to the Himalayas and South America. He works as part of the National Youth Council of the WWF-Philippines to educate and empower the youth to protect and conserve wetlands and mountain ecosystems through the art of visual storytelling. He is a Nikon Ambassador for the Philippines and is an aspiring Environmental Engineer and Conservation Photographer integrating his passion for the arts and science.

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Jahawi Bertolli

Jahawi Bertolli is a National Geographic Explorer, film maker, photographer and music producer from Kenya specialising in wildlife and the underwater world. Growing up in Kenya he nurtured a deep curiosity and love for the natural world and strives to portray the beauty, power and vulnerability of wild environments through his work. His work has taken him across Kenya from the remote northern coast to the Maasai Mara as well as to other distant corners of the globe such as Myanmar and the Galapagos Islands. His clients have included UNEP, SafariLive, CORDIO and SVT Sweden and his work shown at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington and the UN Headquarters in New York.

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Dante Graves

Dante oversees the digital and marketing strategies for the PBS documentary series NOVA’s suite of multimedia content, including long- and short-form video, text journalism, podcasts, and more. Since joining in early 2018, his team has increased NOVA’s non-linear audience engagement by integrating digital content production, distribution, and marketing programs across platforms. Prior to joining NOVA, he led digital growth teams for both for- and non-profit groups, including the Society for Neuroscience, Trusted Media Brands, and more.

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Rocky Collins

As Head of Production and Executive Producer at Vulcan Productions, Rocky Collins works on a range of projects that use storytelling to entertain, educate, and promote change. He helped create and guide the 20-part We the Voters digital series; the 6-part documentary series Ocean Warriors; the 60-minute science doc, Mind of a Giant; a primetime live special, USS Indianapolis Live: From the Deep; and several feature docs, Chasing the Thunder The Cold Blue, Ghost Fleet, and the upcoming Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and The Reason I Jump. Before joining Vulcan, Rocky was Executive Producer at Science Channel where he oversaw many highly-rated and award-winning series, such as Prophets of Science Fiction, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Dark Matters: Twisted but True, Stuff You Should Know, How the Earth Works, Alien Encounters, Race to Escape, and the feature drama The Challenger Disaster starring William Hurt, Bruce Greenwood and Brian Dennehy.

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Ruth Johnston

Ruth Johnston is the General Manager of Vulcan Productions. She leads Vulcan Productions’ award-winning creative media projects across multiple genres and platforms, producing content and campaigns that entertain, inspire, change the way people understand and activate on the world’s toughest challenges. Her recent work includes The Reason I Jump, The Cold Blue, Ghost Fleet, USS Indianapolis: The Final Chapter, and Ballet Now. She also manages Vulcan's content for emerging technologies including augmented and virtual reality, most recently X-Ray Fashionwhich premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Ghost Fleet VR which premiered at Sundance, and Drop in the Ocean which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Before becoming General Manager, Ruth served as Director of Production Management and Business Operations. Prior to joining Vulcan, Ruth was COO of Lion TV in New York, supervising the production of documentary, investigative, entertainment and historical programming for the majority of cable and broadcast networks including PBS, Discovery, National Geographic, MTV and A&E.

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Akansha Sood

With over 17 years of work experience that covers the range and breadth of film production, Akanksha has developed and honed her skills, often in extremely high pressure – high demand settings which range from the jungles to tent pole feature films, crafting scripts to negotiating complex acquisition & co-productions and now to producing and directing her own films. She has won three National Film Awards given by the President of India and nominations at Wildscreen, the UN and Jackson Hole. She is a Juror for the 2018 and 2019 International Emmy ® Awards – Documentary category.

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Carole Tomko

Carole Tomko is a recognized global media executive who has been managing portfolios of businesses and producing award winning content for years. As a mission-driven leader, she has launched and led networks, studios, philanthropic and content ventures. Leading consumer-facing organizations, she has built deep media and industry relationships across private and public sectors and secured financial investors and partners. She is known for her combination of creative, strategic and operational excellence, leading high-performing and matrixed teams with innovation, authenticity, and integrity. She has extensive experience working with networks, streaming services, content providers, internal and external stakeholders, boards, committees, funders, policy leaders, NGOs, and creative content partners.

Currently, Tomko is providing strategic counsel to a variety of organizations that are developing and producing social impact entertainment. She is serving as executive producer on premium series and feature documentaries with the goal of driving awareness and impact around critical issues of our time.

She held executive leadership positions at Vulcan and as General Manager and Creative Director of Vulcan Productions, she strategically shaped and developed projects across genres and platforms; increasing volume, scope, and impact of documentaries, series, digital content, campaigns and scripted programming. The body of work under her Vulcan tenure represents a wide range of substantive projects that have won over 200 industry awards at prestigious film festivals including Tribeca, Sundance and received Oscar nominations and an Emmy for Body Team 12. Her leadership brought Paul Allen’s historic expeditions from remote locations to live streamed broadcasts and specials around the USS Indianapolis and the Musashi, delivering millions of viewers for networks and news outlets.

While leading Vulcan Productions, she was appointed as interim head of both the Communications and Philanthropy divisions during corporate restructures. She launched branding and positioning efforts, optimized digital and social channels, and leveraged Vulcan affiliates. As interim Chief Philanthropic Officer, she restructured the division, streamlined investment areas, built financial models, and established impact metrics and reporting.

Tomko’s experience as President and General Manager of several networks at Discovery Communications helped to rebrand Discovery Health, F

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Kaitlin Yarnall

Kaitlin Yarnall is chief storytelling officer and senior vice president at the National Geographic Society. In this capacity, she is responsible for expanding the organization’s impact in all forms of storytelling including photography, journalism, film, and public experiences. Yarnall manages a creative team that produces impact-driven media and identifies key partnership, grantmaking, and fellowship opportunities with creative talent to further amplify the Society’s mission of a planet in balance. Additionally, Yarnall oversees content-based collaborations with National Geographic Partners across its global media platforms.
Over the course of her nearly 15-year career at National Geographic, Yarnall has assumed a variety of management roles. Previously, she led National Geographic Labs where she oversaw programs, funding, and outreach in the core areas of geographic visualization, exploration technology, digital exploration, and the science of communication. She has also served as an executive director and deputy creative director at National Geographic magazine as well as director of cartography at the Society.
In her role as an executive editor at the magazine, Yarnall also served as the lead editorial manager for National Geographic’s groundbreaking Future of Food project. Launched in 2014, the multiyear project won numerous awards for its coverage of global food security. In addition to her editorial responsibilities, she negotiated and oversaw collaborations with multiple United Nations agencies around food security and agriculture. Yarnall was also deeply involved in conceptualizing the storytelling for National Geographic series on urban impacts and population.
Yarnall joined the National Geographic family in 2005 as a cartographer.
Yarnall frequently speaks on topics such as storytelling, data visualization, mapping, and visual narratives. She has been a keynote speaker at conferences around the globe, been a panelist at a United Nations roundtable, and addressed Scandinavian royals and rock concert audiences.
She has also written extensively about information graphics, data visualization, and cartography. Her book contributions include publications by Taschen, Gestalten, and other international publishing houses. Additionally, she often serves as a jury member for international journalism and design competitions.
Yarnall sits on the Board of Directors for Media Impact Funders.
She earned a B.A. in geography and Spanish literature at Hum

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Nick Zachar

Nick Zachar is a filmmaker currently working for NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries as their Video Producer/Diver. In his current gig he has the opportunity to find and share stories about America’s underwater treasures and the people who dedicate their lives to taking care of them. With a background in Biology and an MFA in environmental filmmaking, Nick specializes in field production and hopes his storytelling inspires viewers to take action in protecting our planet.

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Walter Köhler

WALTER KÖHLER (Executive Producer) has been hailed as an “industry legend” and is both the heart and the head for Terra Mater Factual Studios. As writer and executive producer he has accepted numerous awards in his career, including an Emmy®. Incomparably experienced, highly passionate and on duty around the clock, Köhler made a dream come true when after 30 years at Austria’s broadcaster ORF he launched Terra Mater Factual Studios as a subsidiary company of Red Bull. As the production house’s “leader of the pack” he heads strategic development and steers the company in all creative, technological, financial and commercial matters. He helped Terra Mater shepherd to the screen the feature documentary The Ivory Game, which in 2016 made its worldwide premiere in 190 countries simultaneously. The film was executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, shortlisted for the 2017 Oscars® and won numerous international awards. After this success they produced Sea of Shadows, which in 2019 won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at Sundance.
Köhler always felt a strong magnetic pull to work in the media industry. After completing his master’s degree in journalism at Vienna University he joined ORF and oversaw the production of numerous award-winning productions in the nature, science and history genres. In this capacity Köhler helped nature conquer the big screen with BBC features Deep Blue (2003) and Earth (2007).

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Julia Cort

Since joining NOVA in 1991, Julia has contributed to more than one hundred films and miniseries, covering everything from ancient engineering to quantum mechanics to the frontiers of artificial intelligence. She has served as Executive Producer on some of NOVA’s most acclaimed episodes and mini-series, including NOVA Wonders, Making North America, Black Hole Apocalypse, Poisoned Water, and Addiction. In addition to overseeing long-form documentaries, since 2017 Julia has overseen NOVA’s digital video. Her work has received the Peabody Award, the National Academies Keck Communication Award, the AAAS Science Journalism Award, and the News and Documentary Emmy.

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Caitlin Saks

Caitlin Saks is a producer for the science series NOVA on PBS. Currently, she is producing and co-hosting the digital series Polar Extremes: Antarctica for NOVA. She also co-produced NOVA's Emmy-nominated 2-hour television special on climate change, Decoding the Weather Machine, and the virtual reality experience Greenland Melting. Previously, as science editor for NOVA, Caitlin developed the story content for the series, including the Emmy nominated and Kavli Award winning film Poisoned Water. Before joining NOVA, Caitlin worked on award-winning films for FRONTLINE, including League of Denial, The Choice 2012, and Money, Power, and Wall Street.

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Ru Mahoney

Ru Mahoney is a freelance Producer passionate about integrating impact strategies pre-through-post production into films tackling the world’s most important science, conservation, and social issues. Her work has been supported by numerous non-traditional media funders, including the National Science Foundation, US Department of State, the EPA, and charitable foundations. She currently leads the Impact Campaign for National Geographic Documentary Films and Terra Mater Factual Studios award-winning feature doc, "Sea of Shadows," for which she was also the Field Producer. She is particularly interested in developing interdisciplinary collaborations focused on solutions-oriented impact outcomes, crafting meaningful action campaigns at the nexus of science, advocacy, social justice and strategic marketing. Ru believes good impact strategies build inclusive coalitions of diverse partners which persist long after film crews have moved on to new stories. Her other credits include Emmy-nominated content for BBC and PBS, and brands like The North Face and Swatch. When she's not neck deep in impact campaigns she works as a Field Producer and Sound Recordist on location, and as the Principal Investigator for three (and counting) NSF funded studies on science communication through media for Jackson Wild.

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Candice Odgers

Candice Odgers is a producer, editor, sound editor and colorist. But above all, a story teller. Candice Graduated from AFDA (South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance) after receiving a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Motion Picture Medium (Film). Majoring in Editing and sub majoring in Sound Design and Production Design. She has gone on to spend 16 years crafting natural history films with a deep passion for wildlife and the preservation the planet’s great wilderness’.

Getting outdoors as much as possible is imperative to keep her in balance. Candice spent time honing her craft at Briteside Television, Aquavision Productions and Earth Touch then went on to spend a decade at Wildlife Films with Dereck and Beverly Joubert as Senior Editor and Head of Post Production later going freelance but remaining part of their resource pool.

Candice has presented on numerous panels and contributed to talks on editing as well as navigating the extensive deliverables given out by international broadcasters, presented editing Master classes and written articles for various publications on the craft of editing. She was granted the esteemed honor of being awarded the SAGE acronym which is the highest honor that SAGE (The South African Guild of Editors) can bestow on an editor. Candice has been recognized both in South Africa as well as internationally for various awards. She was nominated three times and then received the coveted SAFTA award for Best Editing. She was part of the Editing team that won the prestigious Best Editing Award at the Jackson Hole wildlife film festival, as well as the IWFF award for Best Editing.

Many films she has worked on have gone on to achieve various awards including a nomination in the Outstanding Nature Programming Category at the 2016 Emmy Awards. Candice has served three times as a judge for the SAFTA'S (South African Film and Television Awards) as well serving as a Final judge. Also serving as a judge in the ROSCAR awards at the Wildlife Conference Wild Talk Africa. Serving twice as a judge for the prestigious Jackson Hole wildlife film festival and serving as a judge for the Jackson Hole Living Oceans World Wildlife day showcase and judging again in this year’s Jackson Wild media awards.

She has worked on many films and delivered them to some of the finest broadcasters in the world, namely National Geographic, PBS Nature, Terra Mater Factual Studios, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Channel Five, ZDF

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Ellen Windemuth

Ellen Windemuth is the founder and joint CEO of the company. She founded Off the Fence in 1994 after working for Fremantle and Atlantis. Under her leadership the company acquired, produced and co-produced over 6,000 hours of content. Ellen is a seasoned Executive Producer and Distributor, and has produced over 500 hours to date herself. She is the Chair of the Jackson Hole Film Festival Board and is also a recipient of Wildscreen’s Christopher Parson’s Outstanding Achievement Awards 2018. Ellen is active in conservation and land development, has three children and a great passion for the outdoors.

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Allison Bean

Allison joined Off the Fence at the beginning of June 2006. She began her television career at Survival Anglia Ltd. in 1998 after gaining her doctorate in human evolution from Cambridge University. She then went on to develop and produce natural history and science documentaries for Channel 4, ITV and TLC before moving to Granada TV in Bristol. At Granada she developed, produced and directed a wide range of award winning documentaries for Discovery, TLC, National Geographic, Animal Planet, and Five.

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Andrew Solomon

Since 2011 Andrew has edited ORF’s UNIVERSUM strand, commissioning, coproducing, broadcasting and distributing blue chip wildlife documentaries, working with leading Austrian and international production companies and major partner broadcasters in Europe, Asia, Australia and the USA. Previously Andrew was head of Documentary Studio Hamburg and Commissioning Editor, Wildlife, for Canal+ subsidiary Docstar.

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Stephen Dunleavy

Stephen Dunleavy is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with almost 30 years’ experience. He has worked in some of our planet’s most extreme environments and has produced and directed a huge range of programmes – from landmark series such as David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, to imaginative children’s wildlife series Little Prairie Dogs.

In 2010, Stephen established Humble Bee Films to pursue stories focusing on natural history, science and discovery. The company’s first commission was a sixty-minute documentary about the Komodo dragon, for BBC and Animal Planet. This programme revealed the new discovery of the Komodo dragon’s venomous bite.

Since then, as head of Humble Bee Films, Stephen has overseen the production of four seasons of David Attenborough’s critically acclaimed Natural Curiosities for UKTV and BBC. The series combines history, science and natural history and has been distributed to 60 countries worldwide.
Humble Bee Films has also produced a raft of one-off documentaries, including the recent award-winning Amazing Pigs for Smithsonian Channel and Terra Mater.

As well as traditional terrestrial and cable networks, Humble Bee Films is now making premium content for the growing SVOD market.

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Ellen Nodine

As the Center for Public Interest Communications’ Director of Programs and Training, Ellen Nodine oversees the daily operations while providing leadership in the strategic direction of the unit. As a coach within the center, she helps organizations apply a public interest communications framework to their work, which uses science-driven strategic communications and storytelling to advance positive social change.
Through the Center, she’s worked as a coach for numerous entities including the United National High Commissioner for Refugees Innovation Service; scientists and program officers at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture; program directors and leaders of Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America; University of Florida scientists, program leaders and educators; and many foundation and nonprofit communicators.
Ellen also directs the University of Florida’s online master’s in public interest communications, the first of its kind in the nation. As director, she provides guidance for curriculum development and facilitates faculty and students in the program.
She serves as the lead organizer for the frank gathering, a three-day conference uniting a community of communication strategists, behavioral and social scientists, artists, funders, agencies, business leaders and advocates working to drive positive social change.
Ellen received her Master of Education from the University of Florida, with a specialization in education technology. Her area of study is community building, social presence and social media. She spent 20 years in the Caribbean, working in the community and co-founded a not-for-profit K-12 school.

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Adam May

Harnessing emerging technology to tell fundamental stories in innovative ways is at the heart of Adam’s work.

He began his film career in Melbourne, Australia - before moving to London in 2002 to radically expand his creative horizons.

In 2008, the opportunity to launch Vision3 with Chris Parks opened up a raft of exciting new paths to reach audiences - by embracing the challenge of using Stereoscopic Filmmaking as an emotional tool, rather than a technical one.

Over the last 10 years as Director of Production, Adam has worked closely with leading Feature Studios and Broadcasters on some of the most acclaimed Stereo 3D productions, including ‘Gravity’, ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ and ‘Flying Monsters with David Attenborough’. Adam was also central to developing the UK industry’s approach to 3D film and TV, and co-created the 3D Creative Summit in 2014

The emergence of VR has allowed Adam to lead new and innovative productions, directing awarding-winning 360 Films and executive producing ‘My Africa’ (winner Best VR/360 Storytelling Jackson Hole Science Media Awards 2018). Alongside ‘My Africa’, Adam created the interactive experience ‘My Africa: Elephant Keeper’ - transporting audiences to Kenya’s Reteti Sanctuary to use real world objects to care for a photo-realistic Baby Elephant in a VR environment.

‘Drop In The Ocean’ provided an opportunity to further utilise the power of virtual reality – exploring how a social experience can lead directly to impact and behaviour change. Creating a groundbreaking motion capture system allowed audiences to see each other and interact within the experience with complete freedom. ‘Drop In The Ocean’ was launched at the Tribeca Film Festival 2019, before opening to the public at the California Academy of Sciences.

Adam is excited by the amazing opportunities for audience engagement, social impact and moments of sheer wonder that VR provides.

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Jared Lipworth

Jared Lipworth is Executive Producer and Director of Outreach & Impact at HHMI Tangled Bank Studios. Jared is an Emmy-winning executive producer and writer who has overseen production and development of hundreds of hours of popular factual, science, natural history and history programs. In his role as executive producer at HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, Jared oversees development and editorial on select films. As director of outreach and impact, he develops and executes high-profile national impact campaigns for Studios projects. Prior to HHMI, Jared was vice president of specials and executive producer at National Geographic Studios, where he oversaw the production and development of science and nature films for National Geographic, Wild, and other national and international broadcasters. Before that, Jared was director of the science unit at WNET in New York, where he oversaw award-winning science and history specials and series for PBS and international partners.

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Pamela Aguilar

Pamela A. Aguilar is Senior Director of Programming and Development for PBS. In this role she identifies, develops and oversees the production of original Primetime content across various genres: arts & culture, history, science, nature, independent film, and a segment of scripted. She works closely with co-producing partners like VOX Entertainment, NHNZ, the BBC, and with producing member stations like AETN, WGBH, WNET and TPT.

Her latest project, No Passport Required season two with Chef Marcus Samuelsson (VOX), is a multi-platform docu-series that celebrates America’s diverse cultures. Other credits include, Big Pacific, narrated by Daniel Dae Kim (NHNZ), Dictator’s Playbook (TPT), The Wonders of Mexico, narrated by Anthony Mendez, Food Delicious Science, 9 Months That Made You (BBC), and the 2019 Emmy nominated, Going to War (VULCAN).

Prior to joining PBS, she worked as an executive producer/director/writer/producer creating innovative unscripted content in the areas of science, history, social justice, and pop-culture. Her credits include, America by the Numbers, about the impact of America’s changing demographics, The Graduates/Los Graduados, about the high school dropout crisis, and Between Two Plates, a satirical scripted Telenovela she created, on healthy eating for the WIC Nutrition Program. Her career kicked off in TV-commercial production where she worked on top brand-named national client advertising campaigns.

Pamela serves on the board of Women Make Movies and NALIP’s Diverse Women in Media Advisory Board; is a graduate of The New School University in New York City, she hails from the Golden State of California.

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Brian Armstrong

Author and award-winning filmmaker, Brian Armstrong, has more than 30 years experience producing 2D, 3D and VR films all over the globe for clients such as the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Wild, Animal Planet, The Smithsonian Network, and for the Nine Network in his native Australia. Brian’s expeditions have identified a new species of primate, led to the creation of a national park in Madagascar, and revealed the location of a new great white shark hot spot.
Since 2010 Brian has been the president of Red Rock Films. In 2018 Red Rock was the world’s largest provider of US-based natural history content, with offices in Silver Spring and Johannesburg. The New York Times called one of Red Rock’s series “Dazzling” and “stunning” while last year the Wall Street Journal labeled another Red Rock series “visually astonishing.” Red Rock’s current projects include Planet of the Whales for Nat Geo and a natural history development deal with Sigourney Weaver.
Brian is married with three kids and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He has been described as a larrikin, a genius and a scallywag – all by his mother.

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Howard Swartz

Howard Swartz is Senior Vice President of Production and Development, Documentaries and Specials for Discovery Channel. In his current role, Swartz is responsible for developing and executing production strategies for documentaries, specials and event programming, such as Shark Week, Egypt Live, and the recently premiered Serengeti, which debuted to record-ratings as the highest rated nature documentary in six years.
Most recently, Swartz was Arrow Media’s Executive Vice President of Development and Production, based out of their London office, where he helped to expand the company’s robust U.S. slate. His projects spanned several networks, including Science Channel, Animal Planet and Discovery Channel.
Prior to joining Arrow, Swartz served as Vice President, Documentaries and Specials for Discovery Channel where he oversaw high-profile global specials, including audience favorite Shark Week, as well as Skywire Live With Nik Wallenda, which was the highest-rated live event in Discovery Channel history. He also oversaw Discovery’s landmark Emmy® nominated science series Curiosity, which looked to answer one question in science, technology and society in each episode.
Before joining Discovery in 2011, Swartz was Executive Producer at PBS’ acclaimed science series NOVA where he received the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont Award as well as an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. Prior to NOVA, Swartz was with the National Geographic Channel, where he oversaw signature series Explorer and executive produced more than 100 programs, including Emmy®-winners Five Years on Mars Inside Living Body and Incredible Human Machine.

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Wes Larson

As a wildlife biologist I have been working with polar, black and grizzly bears for the past 8 years, and during that time finished a masters in wildlife conservation with an emphasis on both polar and black bear human conflict mitigation. The majority of my fieldwork has been conducted in the Alaskan Arctic as well as Southern Utah, but I have assisted on projects throughout the United States and as far as South Africa. My work has been featured by national media companies such as National Geographic, CNN and Al Jazeera, and I currently have one published scientific paper and another two that are in review and should be published by the end of the year. I have presented research findings in various wildlife meetings around the world, most recently at the International Bear Association meetings in Ljubljana Slovenia.
My passion for wildlife and wildlife conservation stems from an upbringing in Montana. Even as a child I understood the fact that a rapidly encroaching human population into the wild areas I loved would cause wildlife to be displaced or eradicated, and I developed a deep interest into how that conflict could be resolved, and that interest has led me to a life devoted to wildlife conservation.

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Jorge Franzini

Jorge Franzini has produced and written a wide range of highly acclaimed documentaries for CuriosityStream, including its first original series Destination: Pluto, its first 4K series Underwater Wonders of the National Parks, the award-nominated Jason Silva special Transhumanism, as well as the successful CuriosityStream strand Breakthroughs. Outside of his duties as a writer and executive producer, he works alongside the programming team as a liaison with outside production companies and partners.
Prior to joining CuriosityStream, Franzini spent the early years of his career in the field, working on a variety of broadcast and commercial projects. He was also a member of the production team for two seasons of the national, weekly public affairs show Inside E Street for PBS, and was a producer for one of the earliest digital media companies specializing in streaming content.

In his spare time, Franzini has served as a judge for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, the Science Media Awards, and the News and Documentary Emmy Awards. He has also participated on panels at the World Congress of Science and other festivals. Franzini studied communications at the University of Maryland and digital filmmaking at Boston University.

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Eric Meyer

Eric G. Meyer is the Founder and Executive Director of Generation Atomic, a nuclear advocacy non-profit. He started out pursuing a career in professional singing, but after hearing about the promise of advanced nuclear reactors and having his car swept away by a 500 year flood, he decided to devote his life to protecting and expanding the use of atomic energy to fight climate change. He worked as an organizer on several political, union, and issue campaigns while in graduate school for applied public policy, taking time off to attend the climate talks in Paris and sing opera parodies about nuclear power and climate change on buses and trains. Meyer founded Generation Atomic in late 2016. Since then he's worked to shift the narrative around nuclear energy by creating unique social media videos (like a music video at the Experimental Breeder Reactor), training nuclear supporters to have more effective nuclear conversations, and organizing unforgettable events. He was featured in the 2017 documentary "The New Fire" for his work, and to date, has only been kicked out of one climate march for supporting nuclear energy.

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Sandesh Kadur

Sandesh Kadur creates award-winning wildlife documentary films and photography books exposing the need to conserve threatened species and habitats around the world.

Sandesh Kadur has been sitting in a concealed blind, camera trained on a rhino carcass, for six uneventful days. Silent, back-aching, ten-hour, hundred degree days. The rhino died of natural causes and should be a mouthwatering magnet for a hungry tiger, but so far only buzzing flies have come calling. The decision to return to the blind for a seventh day seems irrational but is hugely rewarded. Not one, not two, but three stunning tigers arrive and feed—behavior never before captured on film. The week epitomizes the "three Ps" Kadur lives by: patience, perseverance, and passion.

Kadur hopes his photographs, videos, and documentaries will reveal places and species people rarely see and will inspire new passion to protect them. His work spans cloud forests and endangered sea turtles in Mexico, rain forests and king cobras in India, the breeding cycle of threatened birds in Indonesia, and orphaned clouded leopards being rehabilitated back to the Himalayan jungle. “I help people connect emotionally with the beauty of the wilderness, bring conservation issues to light, and raise awareness in a way that fosters respect and concern. I don’t just want to take pretty pictures,” he says. “I also try to make powerful graphic images that expose how much we are losing.”

Often his work provides a first ever glimpse of certain animal behaviors in the wild. He caught the 12-foot-long stars of his king cobra documentary courting, fighting, mating, and nest building—action rarely witnessed in the wild. The locations he explores, often for many months at a time, may be the only corners of the world where particular species exist. His latest quest takes him to remote regions of the eastern Himalaya in search of the clouded leopard, a cat so elusive and undocumented that Kadur calls it the holy grail of wildlife photographers. “I’m shining a global spotlight on rare animals most people will never be able to meet face-to-face.”

No place holds more personal significance to Kadur than the site of his very first documentary, the Western Ghats. This ancient mountain range in southwestern India remains one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet, home to hundreds of globally threatened species, crucial to the monsoon weather pattern, and a water source for hundreds of millions of peo

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Mike Olcott

MIKE OLCOTT is an award-winning producer of short-form video and documentary films. Since 2015, he’s led a prolific digital team at National Geographic creating content in support of the NG Society, NG Channel, Kids, Education and Brand Marketing teams. Television work includes Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina on PBS, America’s Wildest Roads on Travel Channel, and The Great Build chronicling the construction of Saudi Arabia’s first-ever cultural center. Whether writing sizzle reels tailored to social media or researching a long-form documentary for worldwide broadcast, Mike’s experience follows his passions – encompassing a diverse set of subjects including conservation, science journalism, and popular culture.

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Tom Synnatzschke

Jörn Röver

Jörn Röver received his university degree in Biology in 1993 with a research in zoology and ecology. In 1994 he graduated from the German School of Journalism (DJS) in Munich and worked as a reporter for Newspapers. From 1995 to 2000 he worked for the Public Broadcaster ZDF (Channel 2), first as author and director for health and wildlife magazines, later as executive producer for the prime-time wildlife series “Naturzeit”.

In 2001 he became Head of NDR Naturfilm at Studio Hamburg, where since he is being producing Hundreds of shows for Public Broadcaster ARD (Channel 1) and NDR in Hamburg (Channel 3) like the series “Wild Russia” with Animal Planet and National Geographic, “Americas National Wonders” with National Geographic or “Wild New Zealand” with the BBC. Other regular co-partners are: Arte, ORF, Terra Mater, SVT and NHK. The NDR Naturfilm documentaries have won over 300 awards at national and international film festivals.

In 2010 Jörn Röver was appointed as managing director at Doclights GmbH at Studio Hamburg. While still continuing to produce the regular wildlife strands for NDR and ARD, he additionally produced the feature-length cinema documentaries about the Serengeti, Russia, the European Forest, the North Sea and bear families.

In 2014 he launched a print magazine called “Tierwelt live” and developed a VoD- platform with the same name in 2016 for online, SmartTV, Amazon Fire and other releases. The platform generates over 1 Mio. visits per month in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It streams blue chip wildlife films of the BBC, Doclights and ZDF, pet shows, slow TV and educational content.

In 2018 he started with the help of foundations and private sponsors the conservation campaign “#6 – Fighting Extinction” on social media and off air, combined with a theatrical release about the global loss of species in 2021.

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Casey Sapp

Casey runs two businesses as both CEO of VRTUL (Virtual Reality Technology Underwater Limited) focused on technology development and production services for underwater cinema, and Blue Ring Imaging designing and manufacturing underwater camera products. VRTUL's clients include the BBC, Discovery, National Geographic, Good Morning America, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and many others at the cross section of cinema and science.

Some of Casey's inventions with VRTUL include the first 360 3D underwater camera system, the first underwater 360 live broadcast (GMA), the first ROV VR piloting system (MBARI), the first 360 cinematic camera on a submarine, and the highest resolution underwater cinematic camera system in the world (MSG Spheres).

In 360/VR storytelling Casey has played many roles as a Producer, DP, Camera Tech, and Post-Supervisor. Most notable productions include: Into the Now (2019), Our Blue Planet VR (2019), Into Water (2019), Hydrous Immerse (2018), Sharkwater VR (2018), Mako Madness (2017), and Orca 360 (2016).

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Bertie Gregory

Since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, filmmaker Bertie Gregory has been obsessed with wildlife. His wildlife photography earned him recognition early on in his career, including the distinction of being named a National Geographic Young Explorer and the Youth Outdoor Photographer of the Year. Bertie's goal is to now find stories that get people to fall in love with the natural world and show that looking after wildlife is more than just a nice thing to do; it's crucial to all our futures. He splits his time between producing and hosting a digital series for National Geographic WILD called Wild_Life with Bertie Gregory and shooting behind the camera as a cinematographer for the BBC's David Attenborough series.

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Miura Kite

Miura Kite serves as Senior Vice President of Television for Participant Media, the global media company founded in 2004 by Jeff Skoll dedicated to entertainment that inspires audiences to engage in positive social change.

In her role, Kite works to expand Participant’s narrative and documentary television slate by identifying, developing, packaging and executive producing high-end properties for premium cable, basic cable, digital and emerging platforms. At Participant, she has been involved in the development of Ava DuVernay’s Emmy Award®-nominated limited drama series, When They See Us, for Netflix; and Noughts and Crosses for BBC1. Kite joined Playtone in 2001 before being promoted in 2003 to Head of Development, a role she held until her departure from the company in 2011. In her role as Head of Development at Playtone, Kite co-produced the HBO Emmy Award®-winning film, Game Change, and HBO’s Emmy Award®-winning miniseries, The Pacific. She served as Development Executive on films Where the Wild Things Are, City of Ember, Starter For 10, Mamma Mia! and Participant Media’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and was involved in the development of five seasons of HBO’s series Big Love and the miniseries John Adams. Previous to that, she worked for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella at Mirage Enterprises and Jonathan Demme at Clinica Estetico.

Kite serves on the Advisory Board of WeForShe, a women’s advocacy group that strives to find practical ways to bring about a gender-balanced landscape in television, and she is a Member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

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Mickey Meyer

Mickey Meyer is the President of Group Nine's Network and a cofounder of JASH, a comedy studio with roots in both the digital and television world and featuring such clients as Adam Carolla, Norm Macdonald, Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric, Reggie Watts and Michael Cera. In addition to his role at JASH, Mickey served on the Entertainment Advisory Council to Obama administration, meeting with President Obama and various other White House officials including Joe Biden and Valerie Jarrett.

Mickey has been named to Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30 list as well as the Hollywood Reporter's Next Gen executives under 35 list. He has also won Sundance, multiple Cannes Lion's in the advertising space, a Streamy for his work with the White House, and a Gold Record. Prior to JASH, Mickey was the head of the Comedy Network and then Executive Producer at Maker Studios, where he Executive Produced YouTube channels like Epic Rap Battles of History, Bad Lip Reading, Good Neighbor and Kassem G.

He also loves dogs, the Yankees and the color blue.

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Kevin Iro

Kevin Iro Played professional Rugby League for 14 years (1987-2000) representing the Kiwis in 34 Tests, and The Cook Islands Rugby League team from 1997-2004. He is a tutor/manager and founder of the Cook Islands Sports Academy (CISA) from 2006-2012, mentoring 15-19-year-old students who were working towards a National Certificate in sports. He started Rakei Toa in 2010, an alternative education program to cater for young school leader’s aged 12-14 that had disconnected with the main stream education system. In 2009 he managed the Tumanava program which mirrored the CISA program, but instead was Trades based. All three programs aimed to pathway students in to employment, sports careers, back in to the formal education system or further trades training.
He is the founder of the Marae Moana concept, a large multi-use marine protected area, and is currently the Marae Moana ambassador working with communities to build awareness and to highlight the importance of our ocean and its resources. Kevin is married to Tina Iro, and has 6 children-Ashleigh, Andre, Kristiana, Kayal, Faith, and Kaleb.

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Liam Kokaua

Liam is a māori living on his ancestral lands on the island of Rarotonga. He works as a project officer for the Cook Islands’ environmental NGO, Te Ipukarea Society. Te Ipukarea translated from māori, means “inherited land” or “ancestral home”. His work at Te Ipukarea Society revolves around 5 focal areas: biodiversity conservation, climate change, ecologically sustainable development, waste management, and youth. Through his work he regularly supports the Takitumu Conservation Area, the Cook Islands’ first terrestrial conservation area managed by customary landowners. He also assists the conservation efforts on Suwarrow National Park, an uninhabited atoll which belongs to the people of the Cook Islands. Liam is a member of the Technical Advisory Group for Marae Moana (the Cook Islands Marine Park), representing Non-Government Organizations working in social welfare. Some of his other interests include restoration of cultural heritage sites, language revitalization, and learning and practicing traditional knowledge.

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Ryan Hawley

Ryan Hawley comes from a family that for many years has been making efforts to protect Ahnd Atoll from overfishing and poachers. Ahnd is now recognized as a biosphere reserve and the family’s goal is to improve and sustain Ahnd's marine environment. As a husband and a father of two, Ryan wants to ensure that his children get to continue enjoying this beloved part of their home for the rest of their lives, as well as continue this legacy for the generations after them.

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Elliot Kirschner

Elliot Kirschner is a New York Times best-selling author and Emmy-award winning news and documentary producer with a passion for science storytelling. He is a producer and executive producer on the gene editing documentary Human Nature and was supervising producer on the science film The Most Unknown. Elliot started at CBS News, as a producer for 60 Minutes, Sunday Morning and the Evening News. His longtime collaboration with journalism icon Dan Rather has led to numerous news reports and short films about science.

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Charles Poe

As head of production for Smithsonian Channel, Charles Poe guides the editorial process for programming that combines the entertainment DNA of parent company Showtime with the boundless assets of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex. Poe remains a hands-on Executive Producer for series and specials, including the Jackson Wild Media Award nominee, “Laws of the Lizard.”

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Tara Roberts

Tara Roberts is a National Geographic Storytelling Explorer. Currently, she is following a group of Black scuba divers, historians and archaeologists as they search for and help document slave trade shipwrecks around the world. Her goal is to re-imagine and reframe the origin story of Africans in the Americas and to tell stories that humanize and bring empathy, nuance and complexity to their human journey. Tara is working on a long-form narrative about this journey as a fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Tara also believes deeply in giving shape and substance to the original ideas of women and girls and encouraging their bold action and achievement. She has edited several books for girls, published her own bold, pro-female and socially conscious magazine and spent a year backpacking around the world to find and tell stories about young women change agents, which led to the creation of a social enterprise that supported and funded their big ideas.

Additionally, Tara has worked as an editor for CosmoGirl, Essence, EBONY and Heart & Soul magazines. And she served as Director of Communications for Ashoka and coached social innovators for Red Bull’s Amaphiko Academy.

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Laura Marshall

Laura Marshall is the CEO of Icon Films, the independent UK TV production company she co-
founded in 1990 with Harry Marshall, Chair. Icon Films is an internationally established
production company creating a broad range of unscripted content for over 25 years, and
broadcast internationally.
As CEO, Laura is responsible for the overall strategy of the company, overseeing a staff of one
hundred plus, and forging the company’s creative identity and vision. She Eps much of Icon
Films’ productions; credits include Savage Kingdom, River Monsters, Big Foot: The New
Evidence, Primal Survivor and Wild India.
Laura is vocal in her advocacy for more regional and diverse representation in television and sits
on the PACT Council (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television) where she actively
participates in various working groups. She is Chair of Wildscreen, bringing the world’s wildlife
and environmental filmmakers and photographers to Bristol on a biannual basis.
Alongside these roles, Laura is actively involved with other organisations and charities across
Bristol. Icon Films has crafted films for many charities at home and abroad as part of its
engagement with, and responsibility for, the world we live in, including the Whitley Fund for
Nature, Bristol Old Vic and St Peter’s Hospice.

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Hélène Ganichaud

Since June 2016, Helene Ganichaud is the deputy head of the Specialist Factual Unit at ARTE France. She commissions natural history, science, expedition and history programmes. Before that, she was a London-based freelance producer, writer and director for more than 10 years working mostly for the BBC in-house specialist factual unit.

Her credits include 700 Sharks for Arte and National Geographic, Forces of Nature for BBC1, Wonders of life; Oceans and Trust Me I’m A Doctor for BBC2, Animal Fight Night for National Geographic and Supersized Earth for Discovery.

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Geoff Luck

Geoff Luck is an executive producer and director who’s made scores of nature and science programs, filmed on six continents, and served as showrunner for ten television series. His work has been featured on Netflix, Nature, NOVA, National Geographic, ZDF and others, and celebrated at the United Nations and The Museum of Modern Art. His most recent film, Naledi: One Little Elephant, was nominated for an Emmy.

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Catherine Upin

Catherine Upin is an Emmy Award winning and nominated producer and director with extensive experience in narrative journalism and documentary filmmaking.

She produced and directed Greenland Melting, a first of its kind groundbreaking VR documentary with walk-around technology and a companion 360 video film, about Greenland's glaciers melting faster than expected. A collaboration with Frontline, NOVA, Emblematic Group, and xRez Studio, the cutting-edge VR experience premiered at the Venice International Film Festival's inaugural VR film competition and in North America at SXSW.

For PBS Frontline she has also produced, written and directed films including the Emmy nominated Climate of Doubt exploring groups working to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change; and Emmy nominated The Child Cases, an investigation with Pro Publica correspondent A.C Thompson on questionable convictions in child death cases.

She has also produced documentary, film and investigative projects for PBS, WNET, WGBH Interactive and other major outlets, including civil rights progress, a landmark Supreme Court case, and a project with naturalist E.O. Wilson.

Ms. Upin spent 10 years as a long-form narrative and investigative producer for ABC News, producing Emmy nominated investigations, documentaries, high-profile specials and features including programs on charity hospitals profiting from the uninsured, the Catholic Church in Crisis, 9/11 Moment of Crisis, and Zubaida’s Journey, a young Afghan burn victim's cultural transformation in the U.S.

She is the recipient of 2 News and Documentary Emmy Awards; 5 News and Documentary Emmy nominations, including outstanding investigative journalism, outstanding coverage of a continuing news story, outstanding science and cultural programming; and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award as a contributing producer to ABC News' 9/11 coverage.

Catherine’s vision is to continue to push the boundaries of VR, to take people to remote untouched places, and to increase the impact of documentary filmmaking to inform and understand the world around us.

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Christopher LaFranchi

Christopher founded OneReef on the insight that local communities are the most effective coral reef stewards when armed with agency and resources. He believes that when local and foreign partners effectively combine resources, solutions are created that neither party could derive acting alone. Christopher is a social entrepreneur and pioneer of the OneReef Community Partnership Model, a platform for international agreements with communities who protect the most species-rich places on Earth. Accomplished at policy analysis, community engagement, diplomatic work, and applied economics and science, he was a former Rainer Arnhold Fellow at the Mulago Foundation and was nominated for the Pew Fellowship in Marine Science. Prior to his role as CEO, he held previous positions at the World Bank, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and US Agency for International Development.

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Marcus Pearson

Marcus leads Adventure Scientists’ efforts to develop and expand the organization’s programs. Prior to this, he spent over a decade working in environmental law and policy, where he led landscape, wildlife, and resource conservation advocacy efforts in the United States and Latin America.

He joined Adventure Scientists because throughout his law practice he recognized that high-quality field data forms the foundation for addressing globally-critical environmental and human health issues. Much of these data are only found in hard-to-access corners of the world: tree canopies, high alpine environments, deserts, offshore reef systems, and other areas deep in the backcountry. Adventure Scientists recruits, trains, and manages a global community of outdoor athletes––ultrarunners, mountaineers, whitewater rafters, transoceanic sailors, and others––that is uniquely situated to gather critical data because it is able to match any scale of our partners’ ambitions and needs.

Marcus has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and a J.D. from the University of Washington. After completing a 10,000-mile trans-Latin American journey by bus, foot, and hitchhiking from Tijuana, Mexico to Ushuaia, Argentina, Marcus conducted post-graduate work in international environmental policy at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. He and his family now live and play in Bozeman.

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Sabine Holzer

As Head of the Specialist Factual Department of Terra Mater Factual Studios, Sabine oversees the primetime TV documentary output of the company. Focussing on the production of blue-chip natural history, science and history programs for the national and international market, Sabine works with co-production partners all over the world. In addition to her international activities, she acts regularly as an executive producer for Terra Mater Factual Studios’ productions and also runs the ‚Terra Mater’ TV strand on ServusTV, the German speaking Free TV channel of the Red Bull Media House, showing the world’s very best programs out of the genres of natural history, science and history. Thus, she is also responsible for pre-buys and acquisitions for her TV slot.

Prior to joining Terra Mater Factual Studios, Sabine worked two decades for the science department of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) where she was responsible for acquisitions and scheduling of natural history and science programs and editor and executive producer of a great number of the ORF Natural History Unit’s documentary output.

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Charlie Hamilton James

Charlie has strived over the years to create work that is unique and innovative. His first two stories for National Geographic magazine - kingfishers and otters - were very technically complex stories, requiring equipment invented specifically to achieve certain shots. After this Charlie was assigned a story on vultures in Africa, technically complex again, but which brought in more artistic and journalistic element to the work. As a result of these stories Charlie was asked to join a team of seven photographers shooting a full issue special of National Geographic Magazine on the Yellowstone eco-system. This meant a continuation of technical photography but also a branching out into human related stories and the start of Charlie's career shooting editorial assignments about both people and animals.

Over the last few years Charlie has continued to shoot stories that cover a broad range of subjects both editorially and technically. Manu National Park, for instance not only covered creatures of the rainforest, shot on remote cameras and camera traps, but also portraits and editorial images of indigenous people.

As a photographer working in the Amazon for years, Charlie eventually drifted into ethnographic photography and began covering stories of the people in the Amazon. His 2018 story on Isolated Tribes in the Amazon was his first story solely about people - it covered the lives of some of the Amazon's more isolated tribes and looked at issues of contact and reasons why tribes are often forced out of the forest.

Charlie is currently working on two stories for National Geographic Magazine - Sea otters and a story on the re-wilding of the Osa Peninsular in Costa Rica.

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Jamie Cross

Jamie Patten Cross is Conservation International's Vice President for marketing partnerships. With experience gained working with top corporate brands like Gap Inc., Motley Fool and Discovery Communications, and NGOs like the National Park Foundation, Jamie works to align the public and private sector in partnership for the benefit of people and nature. Conservation International has offices in 29 countries and, along with more than 2,000 partners, works to protect the nature that people need to thrive.

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Jared McGilliard

Jared McGilliard is an Executive Producer and owner of the Pacific Northwest based production company, Nomadica Films. He and his company specialize in film and television series that tell immersive and intimate stories that are hand crafted and often shot in some of the most remote, challenging, and beautiful locations on the planet. He's produced and directed critically acclaimed series such as "Inside Combat Rescue" for National Geographic, and "The Last Alaskans" and "Dodo Heroes" for Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. He and Nomadica are currently producing multiple series and specials on the natural world including Netflix's first ever live action kids series. His focus is aimed at finding unique and character driven stories that allow people to experience our planet in surprising and intimate ways. He believes his job as a storyteller is not only to create content that appeals to those already fighting to save our planet, but craft stories that inspire the rest of the world to take action as well.

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Natalie Cash

Natalie Cash is the Executive Producer in charge of video production at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), an international conservation organization with more than 3,000 field staff in 65 countries. WCS also operates the largest system of urban wildlife parks in the world – Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo and Queens Zoo and New York Aquarium on Coney Island – educating four million visitors each year about the importance of conservation. With three decades of experience in the industry, Cash produces short-form programming about WCS projects and stories for multiple platforms. Her films have won awards at the International Wildlife Film Festival and New York WILD and have been selected as finalists at Wildscreen and the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. Prior to joining WCS, she was a series producer and writer at the Emmy Award-winning documentary production company Pangolin Pictures.

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Max Solomon

Max Salomon is the co-founder of Black Dot Films VR, an industry-leading immersive and cinematic VR production company. With a background as a seasoned multi-Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, he has gone on to produce and direct an award-winning lineup of over 40 VR films for National Geographic and Smithsonian. Critically acclaimed and virally successful, his groundbreaking work in cinematic VR has reached an audience of over 250 million viewers.

His 2018 film POLAR OBSESSION( featuring NGM photographer Paul Nicklen) has recently been nominated for a 2019 News & Documentary Emmy and is the winner of four 2019 WEBBY AWARDS, including BEST CINEMATIC VR.

His 3-part VR series “THE LONG ROAD HOME: MEMORIES OF WAR” - which takes viewers inside the shattered PTSD-laced dreams and memories of 3 soldiers who survived one of the bloodiest days of the Iraq War - recently won the 2018
WEBBY AWARD for BEST CINEMATIC VR, BEST DOCUMENTARY at VR FEST 2017, and the 2018 CINE GOLDEN EAGLE
for BEST NON-FICTION VIRTUAL REALITY.

His 3D VR film "ONE STRANGE ROCK" takes you floating side by side with astronauts to see our home planet from orbit aboard the International Space Station. It is the first 3D VR film shot in space and recently won the LUMIERE AWARD for BEST EDUCATIONAL VR, 2018 VR FEST's BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY and BEST DOCUMENTARY, and a 2019 WEBBY for BEST VR STORYTELLING.

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Ayana Flewellen

Ayana Omilade Flewellen (she/her) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, a storyteller, and a artist. She is the co-founder of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. Currently Dr. Flewellen is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Berkeley. Flewellen will start an appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside in the Spring of 2020. Her research and teaching interests are shaped by and speak to Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery.

Flewellen co-directs a multi-year sustainable archaeology project on St. Croix, USVI in collaboration with The Slave Wrecks Project (SWP) - a global change program comprised of an international network of institutions and individual associates that investigate the global history and enduring legacies of the African Slave Trade, administered by George Washington University and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture – as well as the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), and Diving with a Purpose (DWP), an underwater archaeology advocacy group. As the Co-Principal Investigator of the terrestrial archaeology component of the project, Flewellen explores how Afro-Crucians, from slavery through freedom (1754-1917), interacted with their natural and social environment as processes of self-making through a multi-scale analysis of household, community, and society.

Since the summer of 2016 Dr. Flewellen has worked with Diving with a Purpose (DWP), a community-focused, non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation and protection of submerged heritage resources. Flewellen is now a DWP Instructor and Board Member. She works to promote maritime heritage and advocacy nationwide. Additionally, the Society of Black Archaeologists, in collaboration with DWP and the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), are currently developing a maritime and terrestrial archaeology program for Crucian youth on the island of St. Croix that explores the history and heritage of the global slave trade through maritime sites, combining archaeological research with training and education.

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Jay Haigler

Jay received his initial Open Water training in 2005 through the Underwater Adventure Seekers (UAS) (www.uasdivers.org), the founding club of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS) (www.nabsdivers.org). Mr. Haigler became an Open Water Scuba Instructor in 2010. He continued his dive education by becoming certified as a Master Scuba Diver Trainer by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI). He has also become a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Scientific Diver. The purpose of the NOAA Diving Program is to train, certify and equip scientists, engineers and technicians to perform a variety of underwater tasks in support of NOAA missions.
Recently, Jay was named the Diving Safety Officer for the Scientific Diving Program of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers Foundation. Having developed a strong interest in underwater archaeology, he immersed himself in a program called Diving With a Purpose (DWP) (www.divingwithapurpose.org). Diving With a Purpose (DWP) is a volunteer underwater archaeology program which began under a partnership with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS) and the National Park Service (NPS) in Biscayne National Park located in Homestead, Florida. DWP performs extensive underwater archaeological documentation of shipwrecks; surveys their condition; and develops detailed maps of the wreck sites. In 2009, The United States Department of Interior awarded DWP with the "Take Pride In America National Award” in the Public Private Partnership category.
Jay has become a lead instructor with the program. A graduate of the Catholic University of America, with a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering, Jay enjoys the technical aspects of underwater archaeology, but his passion for teaching has paid dividends for many curious but reluctant prospects. Jay invests countless hours mentoring, training and honing the skills of new divers. As these men and women gain confidence in the water, Jay channels their enthusiasm and encourages their exploration of such meaningful diving pursuits as DWP and Youth DWP.
Jay is currently a director with Diving With a Purpose (DWP). DWP is a core institutional partner in the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP).

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Dr. Albert Jose Jones

Dr. A. José Jones. Trained as a marine biologist, Dr. Jones has spent over fifty (50) years educating and protecting the marine ecosystems and the cultural heritage throughout the world. He is an academician, earning his Ph.D. in Marine Biology from Georgetown University. He has been a Professor of Marine Science. As an Administrator, he served as the Acting Dean of the College of Life Sciences, Chairman of the Environmental Science Department, and Acting Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of the District of Columbia. Dr. Jones also studied marine science for nearly two years at the University of Queensland, Australia as a Fulbright Scholar. He has written many publications in his field and holds over a dozen copyrights on his underwater slide and video series. He has produced several underwater videos, including one entitled "Dive and Tour Morocco" which was shown at the Paris Scuba Show. He has logged over six thousand (6,000) dives worldwide and certified over two thousand (2,000) divers. In addition to his scuba interests, Dr. Jones is a Sixth Degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do and the former U.S. Heavyweight Tae Kwon Do Champion. Through his efforts and those of his friend, Ric Powell, in Miami, they co-founded the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS) in January of 1991. Dr. Jones serves as the chairman of the NABS Science and Education Committee.
These achievements have earned him the scuba diving industry’s highest awards: Rolex Diver of the year from DAN (Divers Alert Network) and the Reaching Out Award from DEMA (Diving Equipment and Marking Association). This year he will be inducted into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame.
Dr. Jones is currently a director with Diving With a Purpose (DWP).
Diving With a Purpose (DWP) is a volunteer underwater archaeology program which began under a partnership with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS) and the National Park Service (NPS) in Biscayne National Park located in Homestead, Florida. DWP performs extensive underwater archaeological documentation of shipwrecks; surveys their condition; and develops detailed maps of the wreck sites.
DWP is a core institutional partner in the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP).

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James Williams

James Williams is the Executive Director of Digital Strategy at PBS NewsHour, where he oversees content and distribution across PBS NewsHour’s many digital outlets. James focuses on innovative journalism and platform-intentional reporting, with an emphasis on the user experience. Prior to PBS NewsHour, James served as VP of Digital Video for National Geographic, developing and executing new short form digital video content with a focus on data and audience metrics. Prior, he held several roles at Discovery Communications, including as an executive producer for Discovery Digital Networks and lead video producer for Discovery News. Projects he contributed to and managed at Discovery were recognized with multiple Webby Awards, an Emmy Award, and a CINE Golden Eagle, and at National Geographic, he was part of the team that was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Exploratory Reporting, among other recognitions. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech.

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Paula Kahumbu

Considered a driving force behind Africa’s conservation movement, Paula Kahumbu, CEO of NGO WildlifeDirect, believes that the future of Africa’s unique wildlife heritage depends on support Africans especially the leadership. Kahumbu spearheaded the successful Hands Off Our Elephants campaign with Margaret Kenyatta, Kenya’s First Lady to mobilize the justice sector in combating elephant poaching and ivory trafficking. She produces a wildlife documentary series for African and global audiences. Shot on location across her native Kenya, WILDLIFE WARRIORS shines a light on African heroes to inspire future generations of African conservationists. She lectures for Princeton University where she earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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Matthew Testa

Matthew Testa has been working in documentary film and television for nearly two decades as a producer, director, showrunner and writer. His work often focuses on the environment, social justice and the interplay between people and the natural world. THE HUMAN ELEMENT is his fourth feature documentary. Previous films include VLOGUMENTARY (YouTube Premium), FREEDOM! THE MOVIE (CMT Docs) and THE BUFFALO WAR (ITVS, winner of 9 festival awards). His television credits include MURDER MOUNTAIN (Netflix), WHALE WARS (Animal Planet), SNAKE SALVATION (National Geographic), GOLD RUSH: ALASKA (Discovery), THIRTY DAYS (FX) and STORM CHASERS (Discovery). He is currently at work on an investigative crime series in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Testa received an MFA in Film Directing from the American Film Institute (AFI) Conservatory in 2004. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Huw Cordey

Huw began his career at Partridge Films, one of the leading independent natural history film companies in the 90’s. After three years with Partridge, he went on to work with Mike Birkhead Associates, where he made two BBC Natural Worlds in the US. He joined the BBC NHU in 1995 where he worked on long running series like Wildlife on One and Big Cat Diary, as well as some of the Unit’s biggest blue-chip landmark series, including Land of the Tiger, Andes to Amazon, and Sir David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals. In 2003, he became part of the Planet Earth team, under Alastair Fothergill, and produced three episodes for this hugely popular and multi award winning series. Following Planet Earth, he was appointed Series Producer of South Pacific, a six-part landmark series for BBC2.

In 2009 he left the BBC to join Silverback Films and, under Keith Scholey, was the series producer for North America – Discovery Channel’s first foray into fully funded blue-chip, landmark natural history programming – which transmitted in 2013: and Discovery International’s Deadly Islands. He was the series producer of the award winning The Hunt, a major blue-chip series for BBC1, transmitted in 2015, looking at the world’s predators and prey. Recently, he produced the jungles episode for Netflix’s first natural history series Our Planet. Currently, he is the series producer of Perfect Planet a blue-chip, landmark series for BBC1 – due for transmission in autumn 2020.

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Alastair Fothergill

Alastair Fothergill, WWF Ambassador, is currently a director of Silverback Films Ltd and series producer of Netflix’s Our Planet. He is executive producer of BBC One series ‘Perfect Planet’ and Disneynature film ‘Penguin’. Alastair is behind 5 of the top 10 grossing natural history cinema films ever. Alastair joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983 and was appointed Head of the Unit in November 1992, aged 32. Alastair’s collaborations with Sir David include ‘The Trials of Life’, ‘Life in the Freezer’, ‘The Blue Planet’, ‘Frozen Planet’, ‘Planet Earth’ and its companion feature film ‘Earth’ released in cinemas. In November 2012 Alastair left the BBC to set up his own production company Silverback Films, making The Hunt for BBC1 and cinema films for Disney nature. Alastair is a fellow of the Royal Television Society and of the Royal Geographic Society, who awarded him their gold medal in 2012.

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Keith Scholey

Keith Scholey is a director of Silverback Films Ltd and series producer of Netflix’s Our Planet. He previously served as executive producer of the Discovery series North America and director of the Disneynature films African Cats, Bears and Blue. Born and raised in East Africa, Keith originally qualified as a Zoologist with both a degree and PhD from Bristol University. He began working with the BBC Natural History Unit as a researcher and subsequently became a producer making many films for the Natural World and Wildlife on One. In 1998 he was appointed the Head of the Natural History Unit and oversaw many series including David Attenborough’s Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals and Blue Planet. In 2002 he was appointed Controller of Specialist Factual and subsequently became Controller of Factual responsible for BBC Natural History, Science, History, Arts, Business and Religious in house productions.

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Tiffany McNeil

Tiffany McNeil is an award winning Cinematographer/Director/Digital and New Media Strategist and has held positions at media companies including HBO, CNN, Huffpost. As Producer/Editor for National Geographic, she led the creation of and built the video strategy around National Geographic's Snapchat Discover. More importantly... she is odd. The stories she tells are strange, yet hopefully relate-able, and she is committed to expanding the narrative, both in the stories we tell as filmmakers, the ways we tell them, and how we distribute them. She is currently working as a Creative Director/Innovations Lead for CBS News/Digital.

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David Elisco

As an executive producer, David Elisco manages the development and production of a portfolio films, focusing on feature-length documentaries. In his work, Elisco is drawn to dramatic stories that touch the heart, inspire wonder and provide new insights into life on Earth – and our place in it. Many of his projects strike a common theme: science is a powerful lens for making sense of the world and a window into the human spirit. For Tangled Bank, Elisco most recently executive-produced the feature documentaries The Serengeti Rules, Inventing Tomorrow, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (currently in postproduction), Super Bugs (in development) and he served as consulting producer to The Farthest.

In addition to his recent work in feature documentaries, Elisco oversaw the development and production of Tangled Bank Studios first projects, including the critically acclaimed three-part series, Your Inner Fish, the one-hour special, Spillover: Zika, Ebola & Beyond, and Can Alzheimer’s Be Stopped.

For much of his career, Elisco served in the trenches as an award-wining writer, producer and director. As such he’s earned a reputation of being a filmmakers’ executive, who brings nearly 30 years of producing experience to the table. Before coming to Tangled Bank, Elisco was VP and Series Producer for Sea Studios Foundation where he produced the critically acclaimed and award-winning series, National Geographic’s Strange Days on Planet Earth, hosted by Academy Award nominee Edward Norton, and The Shape of Life, an eight-hour series chronicling the rise of the animal kingdom. His films and work have appeared on Netflix, Amazon Prime, PBS, National Geographic, Discovery, Smithsonian Channel and NBC.

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Jeff Wilson

Brooke Runnette

I design and build fresh narratives that inspire people to reset old paradigms, strategies that illuminate new pathways and understanding, and collaborative teams and organizations to drive urgent action. I've done this as a storyteller, a grant maker, a studio president, a chief program officer, a board director, an EVP, a community leader, a journalist, an educator, an award-winning filmmaker, and a comedy producer, among other things, at places including National Geographic Society and Studios, Emerson Collective, Discovery & Shark Week, ABC, CBS, 60 Minutes, PBS, Frontline, Nia Tero, Girl Rising, and more.

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David Allen

David Allen is a Producer/Director whose projects span both television and theatrical release platforms. With four Emmys and seven Wildscreen Pandas to his name he is recognised as one of the leading independent producers in his field. Through his London based production company Passion Planet his recent productions includes the multi-award winning MY LIFE AS A TURKEY (BBC/PBS), the PBS conservation series: EARTH’S NEW WILD and H20: THE MOLECULE THAT MADE US; the theatrical release drama/documentary SERENGETI RULES and his recent natural world THE OCTOPUS IN MY HOUSE.

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Ian Rosenberger

Ian founded WORK & Thread in 2012 in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. WORK places the poor into jobs. Thread (under B2B brand "First Mile") takes trash from communities and transforms it into consumer goods for global brands trying to find value in authenticity, transparency, and responsibility. Ian is an expert in landfill community assessment, sourcing strategy, understanding how to translate impact into economic value, and leveraging impact in storytelling. He has spoken about Thread and WORK at SXSW, Harvard Business School, and the United Nations. He is a 2016 Barclay’s Unreasonable Impact Fellow and currently sits on the Ocean Conservancy’s Technical Advisory Committee for the Elimination of Plastic Waste. He is an ultra-marathoner, and in February 2015 founded and participated in the first Run Across Haiti, which has raised nearly $1,000,000 to date for WORK’s programming. He is a brand new dad, and believes that ending poverty and the plastic crisis is all but certain by the time he and his wife Raashi have grandchildren.

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Lynn Hirshfield

Lynn Hirshfield is Participant Media’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances. She joined Participant Media in September 2005 and is responsible for leading the development of ancillary content and strategic partnerships for the company’s social impact campaigns.

Lynn also launched Participant’s publishing division to complement the company’s films and social action campaigns. She has since published 8 books with PublicAffairs/Hachette, two of which hit number one on "The New York Times" bestseller list and is the author of "Girls Gone Green" and two more books for younger readers, the "Sassafras" series.

Prior to joining the staff of Participant, she consulted for a number of film industry-related digital content and technology start-ups, and various studios and venture capital groups specializing in creating new verticals, content deals, and generating strategic partnerships with corporate sponsors.

Previous to entering the digital content arena, she worked as a development executive for productions garnering a number of awards, including four Emmys, a Peabody Award and two Television Critics Awards -- among them the PBS series “Wishbone.” She was also a story editor for National Geographic Feature Films, Scott Rudin, Norman Lear, Tim Burton and Sony, Fox and Warner Bros. Studios.

Lynn is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and the Radcliffe Publishing Graduate Program at Harvard University. She recently executive produced two documentaries, “Augie” on Hulu and “WiSci”, both directed by award-winning filmmaker James Keach. She is also partnered with Monumental Films on a narrative feature about Countess Ada Lovelace being funded by Google and SEE (Science and Entertainment Exchange.) She is an active member of the Producers Guild of America.

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Jonathan Baillie

As executive vice president and chief scientist at the National Geographic Society, Jonathan Baillie oversees grants, impact initiatives, National Geographic Labs, explorer programs, and the international team. He is also the vice chair of the Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

Baillie joined the Society in 2016 after 20 years at the Zoological Society of London, where he founded the EDGE of Existence program and, as conservation programs director, led projects focused on threatened species and their habitats in over 50 countries. Baillie also worked with a network of 8,000 scientists to produce the first International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species to define the status of all mammals. Subsequently, his work has been fundamental in understanding the status and trends of the world’s vertebrates and invertebrates as well as its major ecosystems.

He completed his undergraduate studies in geography at Queen’s University in Canada and received a master’s degree in conservation biology from Yale University. With a P.h.D in biology from Silwood Park, Imperial College London, Baillie has conducted extensive fieldwork, including researching and monitoring western lowland gorillas in Gabon, developing ecotourism sites in central Africa, searching for extremely rare endemic birds in New Guinea, and conducting behavioral studies of desert baboons in Namibia. In addition to his responsibilities at the Society, Baillie is a visiting professor at the University of Oxford.

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Dan Lin

Dan Lin is currently leading storytelling efforts for the Pacific Islands region for Nia Tero. He believes firmly in promoting stories as a vital source of knowledge and guidance towards local, regional, and global conservation efforts, as it has been for countless generations within many indigenous communities. He has spent the past decade working extensively throughout the Asia/Pacific region as a filmmaker and photographer. More recently, Dan has been focused on co-creating film projects with indigenous storytellers in the Solomon Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.

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Wendy Darke

Following on from her 25 year career at the BBC Natural History Unit, where she was responsible for overseeing 1,000 + programmes, Wendy founded True To Nature, a Bristol based Independent Production Company specialising in innovative, world class natural history and premium specialist factual content, using great story telling and never seen before content to connect people of all ages and backgrounds to the natural world.

Since launching the company in 2016, Wendy has secured 5 commissions delivering content for partners worldwide, including BBC, UKTV Dave, Fremantle International, France 5, PBS Nature / WNET Thirteen, ZDFE, ZDF, ARTE, BAMSI, Smithsonian, CBBC & CBeebies.

Airing in 2019, is an ambitious, EXPEDITION with Steve Backshall 10x60’, Premium Factual Adventure Travel, GANGS OF LEMUR ISLAND, 5x60’ BAMSI/Smithsonian/ARTE and Volcano 24, 1 x 60 PBS Nature / ZDFE, ZDF, & ARTE.

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Dereck Joubert

Dereck Joubert is a world renown and award-winning, filmmaker, explorer and conservationist. He is one of just 12 National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, and has worked primarily in Africa on big cats for over 30 years. He has dedicated his life to saving the wild places that protect the large iconic species, and as a founder of the Big Cats Initiative with National Geographic, has led an effort that has funded over 100 grants in 27 countries. Recipient of eight Emmys, a Peabody, Panda awards, the World Ecology Award and the Presidential Order of Meritorious Service by the President of Botswana, Dereck is also the CEO of Great Plains Conservation, and its Foundation established to protect wild land, presently managing over one and a half million acres in Africa.

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2019 Jackson Wild Summit

Speakers

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