Our Festival Guests

Photographer, anthropologist and National Geographic Young Explorer Emily Ainsworth has hitchhiked her way over the Mexican highlands, pitched camp among Mongolian nomads and worked with midget bullfighters, Indian spiritualists and the London Pearly Kings. After graduating with a degree in literature from Oxford University, she joined the Mexican circus as a dancer under the stage name Princess Aurora. Returning to England, she studied anthropology at Cambridge and then photography at Central Saint Martins. Her work has been internationally recognized: She has been awarded the Winston Churchill Exploration Fellowship, the William Wyse Scholarship and the BBC and Royal Geographical Society Journey of a Lifetime Award. Ainsworth is currently based in London, where she is planning her next escape.

With first ascents and routes on walls that span from Antarctica to Patagonia and Alaska to the Himalayas, author and North Face athlete Conrad Anker is a modern climbing legend. His long list of ascents includes the west face of Latok II in Pakistan’s Karakoram, the three towers of the Cerro Toree Massif in Patagonia and the “Streaked Wall” in Zion. Anker was part of the expedition that discovered the body of George Mallory on Mt. Everest in 1999. In October of 2011, along with Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk, Anker realized a long-held dream when he topped out on the Shark’s Fin on Meru in the Himalaya. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he sits on the board of the Conservation Alliance, the Rowell Fund for Tibet and the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation.

Corey Arnold combines his passions in photographs of fishermen and life on the sea. His project “Fish Work,” chronicles the global commercial fishing industry in all its beautiful rawness — the blood and ice, the heaving waves, monster fish and big personalities. The native Californian, who has been fishing since he was 2, worked as a deckhand on a king crab boat in the Bering Sea for seven seasons and currently captains a wild salmon gill-netting operation in Bristol Bay, Alaska. His pictures have been featured in The Paris Review, Esquire, Whitewall, Artweek, Outside, American Photo, Juxtapoz and other publications.

Dan Austin is a co-founder of the 88bikes Foundation, which endows bicycles to girls around the world, especially girls rescued from human trafficking. The organization has endowed nearly 3,000 bikes to kids in 14 countries since 2007, and it partners with vetted NGOs to ensure that local vendors and labor are tapped for the work. Austin is also a multi-lingual explorer, director of seven documentaries and author of three books, including the recent The Road Trip Pilgrim’s Guide. His first documentary feature, True Fans, screened at Mountainfilm in 2000, and he has returned to the festival nearly every year since.

A longtime guest of Mountainfilm, James Balog uses his photography to document changes taking place in the natural world — be it old growth forests, animals or polar ice. His latest project, the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), uses a series of time-lapse cameras to chronicle the rapid recession of glaciers around the world and is the focus of the film Chasing Ice (Mountainfilm 2012). Balog is the subject of the film A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn (Mountainfilm 2005) and has appeared on numerous television shows, including a NOVA special about EIS.

Erin Barnes is an environmental writer and former community organizer who co-founded ioby.org, a non-profit organization that connects people and money to site-based projects, such as urban gardens and bike initiatives, using “crowd-resourcing.” Before that, she earned her master’s of environmental management in water science at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, was the environmental editor at Men’s Journal, did field research on the socioeconomic values of water in the Brazilian Amazon and worked as a public information officer for Save Our Wild Salmon. Along with serving as executive director at ioby.org, Barnes sits on the board of directors for the Manhattan Land Trust, which manages urban community gardens.

In 1961, Barry Bishop made the first ascent of the Himalayan peak Ama Dablam. Two years later, he was one of the first Americans to summit Mount Everest, but he lost his toes and the tips of both pinky fingers on Everest during an unplanned bivouac high on the mountain after their ascent. President John F. Kennedy awarded Hubbard Medal to the team, a distinguished award from National Geographic. Though he stopped climbing, Bishop worked as a photographer, writer and educator with the National Geographic Society. He earned a Ph.D. in geography and, until his retirement in 1994, served as vice chairman, then chairman, of National Geographic's Committee for Research and Exploration. That same year, Bishop died in an automobile accident near Pocatello, Idaho.

Son of the late legendary climber Barry Bishop, Brent Bishop is the first American to follow in his father's footsteps and summit Mt. Everest. Brent first reached the summit of Everest in 1994 and again in 2002 with the National Geographic Mount Everest Expedition that marked the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of the mountain. National Geographic produced the documentary Surviving Everest based on this climb. In 1994, Brent co-founded the Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition (SEE), an organization committed to removing trash from the slopes of Everest. SEE has removed more than 25,000 pounds of trash from the mountain since its inception.

Photographer Matt Black has been documenting contemporary rural life in his native California and in southern Mexico for more than a decade — chronicling the decline of traditional farming and exploring the changing human relationship to land, food farming and community through photographs. Black grew up in California’s Central Valley and started taking photos at a young age, then working as a newspaper photographer in his teens. He studied Latin American and U.S. Labor History at San Francisco State University before documenting it with his photography. His work has been honored widely, receiving awards from the World Press Photo Foundation, the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation and others.

Jonathan Cedar is a product designer who, with his colleague Alexander Drummond, invented the BioLite stove — a camp stove that generates electricity and doesn’t rely on petroleum or batteries for fuel. Cedar was propelled by a desire to create a more sustainable product, but soon after developing a stove for campers and recreationists, he saw potential in the technology on a global scale as an alternative to cooking fires. The revenue from BioLite’s CampStove has helped support long-term development of the HomeStove, a biomass stove that reduces toxic wood smoke, eliminates most black carbon and was designed for dwellings in poverty stricken parts of the world.

For more than two decades, Roger Cohen has worked for The New York Times as a foreign correspondent, then as an editor and now as a columnist, writing about a wide range of issues but focusing on international relations. He has reported from the ground in numerous war zones, including the Balkans (where he penned the award-winning book Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo), Iraq, Libya and Iran, where he was one of the only Western reporters on location to cover the brutal Jasmine Revolution in 2009.

His insight into our rapidly changing world, particularly in the Middle East, has been trenchant. On May 2011, right after the death of Osama Bin Laden, he wrote, “Osama Bin Laden is dead — and so is an old Middle East. That they died together is fortuitous and apt.”

Cohen will bring his expertise to bear as a moderator for post-screening discussions of three films that are related in subject: Dirty Wars, Manhunt and Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? Each film looks at a different facet of the chaotic and fluid world that is the modern Middle East, and Cohen will link these disparate works.

Born in Helena, Montana, photographer Kevin Connolly grew up rafting rivers, skiing and climbing mountains. But Connolly is different from most of his fellow outdoor enthusiasts: He was born without legs. Refusing to let his physical state stop him from pursuing his passions, Connolly won a silver medal in skiing at the X Games. Using his winnings, he took an extended trip around the world, traveling mostly by propelling himself with his arms on a skateboard. Along the way, he documented people’s reactions to both his mode of transportation and his physical defect. The photo series garnered international attention, resulting in a book, Double Take, published in 2009 and exhibitions around the world.

Also known as Dhieu-Deng Leek, John Dau is one of the original Lost Boys of Sudan, featured in the 2006 award-winning documentary God Grew Tired of Us. He has gone on to become a human rights activist for the people of Sudan, founding the John Dau Foundation, which aims to transform healthcare in South Sudan. His work has earned him the respect of his homeland and many awards, including a National Geographic Emerging Explorers Award. Today, Dau lives with his family in Syracuse, New York.

During the last days of the Bush administration, Tim DeChristopher put his liberty on the line by bidding nearly $2 million that he did not have for drilling rights to pristine public lands near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. His act of civil disobedience resulted in the BLM auction being declared null and void, and the Obama administration subsequently removed the land from any future sale. Tim served two years in prison for making false bids on energy leases.

Dennis Dimick serves as executive editor for the environment at National Geographic magazine, where he oversees the publication’s coverage of energy, climate and sustainability issues —  exploring, in his words, “the nexus between human aspiration and the Earth’s ability to sustain it.” He guided the creation of a single-topic issue on global freshwater in April 2010 and was architect for a yearlong 2011 series, called “7 Billion,” on global population and its impact. The magazine’s climate change and energy projects have received awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Overseas Press Club and Pictures of the Year International. Dimick has also co-organized the Aspen Environment Forum since its inception. He holds degrees in agriculture and agricultural journalism from Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He previously worked at newspapers in Oregon, Washington and Kentucky, and has photo edited a dozen National Geographic Society Books, including a 1996 book on the Endangered Species Act called The Company We Keep.

Erden Eruç is the founder of Around-n-Over, an organization committed to educating and inspiring children through human-powered journeys. Eruç was moved by the passing of his climbing partner Göran Kopp in 2002 and soon thereafter took on a huge feat: circumnavigating the world solely by human power. In 2012, Eruç completed his journey, which took 5 years and 11 days, a total of 1,838 days from start to finish. During his trip, Eruç stopped at schools to share his stories with children and Around-n-Over was born.

Drew Fulton is a National Geographic Young Explorer, photographer and avid birder who has stalked avian subjects in canopies from New York to Borneo. His passion for exploring the natural world and documenting biodiversity has taken him to work in Everglades National Park, Australia and the cloud forests of Costa Rica. The lifelong naturalist is also an accomplished tree climber, and when he’s not in the field, he lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches workshops for Cornell Outdoor Education that include tree climbing and photography.

Jeff Goodell was born and raised in Silicon Valley, where his family lived for four generations. Since 1996, he has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he’s written about a variety of subjects — from hookers and politicians to climate scientists and Internet billionaires. In 2001, Goodell wrote a story about the comeback of the U.S. coal industry for The New York Times Magazine, which indirectly led to his third and fourth books about miners and the coal industry. To research How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate, he spent several years with some of the world's top climate modelers, as well as Cold War physicists, philosophers, politicians and entrepreneurs — all of whom are involved with the development of new technologies that might someday be used to manipulate the earth's climate to reduce the risks associated with global warming. How to Cool the Planet won the 2011 Grantham Prize Award of Special Merit, cited as an "immensely readable, carefully researched and groundbreaking contribution to the literature on climate change."

An educator, writer and business consultant, Trevor Hall is the president of Creative Visions Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to help individuals use media and the arts to create meaningful change. He holds a Masters of Education from Harvard University, where he worked as the head teaching fellow for Dr. Robert Coles. He has also served as the associate editor of DoubleTake Magazine, director of the Chicago Sister Cities International Program and was founding director of Open Roads Creative (a business development consultancy) and Open Roads Academy (a summer program for low-income high-school students that combines outdoor travel with an immersion in the documentary arts).

Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, writer Nick Heil has been featured in a variety of outdoor titles, including Men’s Journal, Skiing and Outside, where he is a contributing editor. In 2008, he published Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season, which won the 2008 Banff Mountain Book Festival’s Mountain Literature award.

Chad Hensel is a Pacific Northwest artist whose work represents his colliding love for mountains and photography. The Midwest native attended the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, where he was never drawn to landscapes or photography. When he moved West, he fell in love with high, wild places, which led to climbing, exploring and then photography. Eventually, he developed his unique pieces, patchworks of photographs and painting that reflect the raw and vast qualities of wild places and our connection to them.

John Hockenberry has been a journalist and commentator for more than three decades and has reported from all over the world in virtually every medium. Currently the host of the public radio morning news program "The Takeaway," Hockenberry has been a correspondent for NBC News, ABC News and National Public Radio and an anchor for MSNBC. Recently, he was the correspondent for "Frontline: Climate of Doubt," which explored the political rise of climate change deniers. He has won four Emmys and three Peabody awards and has written dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, a play and two books, including the novel A River Out of Eden, and the bestselling memoir Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence.
 
A skilled presenter and moderator, Hockenberry has appeared at numerous design and idea conferences. including the TED conference, the World Science Festival and the Aspen Comedy Festival. He has served as a Distinguished Fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and is currently a member of the White House Fellows Commission.

He and his wife Alison, also an Emmy and Peabody winner, have five children and live in Brooklyn, NY.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1963, legendary mountaineer Tom Hornbein made history as part of the first American expedition to Everest. Three weeks after Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest, on May 22, 1963, Hornbein and his expedition partner Willi Unsoeld reached the summit by way of one most difficult ascents, the West Ridge. They descended on the south side, completing the first traverse of the mountain. A cornerstone of alpine history, Hornbein documented the experience in his book Everest: The West Ridge.

Lindsay Hower is the U.S. director of Right to Play, which uses sport and play to help overcome the effects of conflict and disease in disadvantaged communities. The international organization was featured in the film Right to Play, which won the Audience Award at Mountainfilm in 2012.

Aaron Huey is a National Geographic photographer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor, Stanford Knight Fellow, climber of rocks, wearer of gold shoes, father, husband and artist. He is well known for his 2002 solo walk across America, and he built an artist-in-residence program on the Pecos River near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since 2005, Huey has been visiting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and photographing the staggering poverty there that is largely ignored in this country. He presented this arresting work in a moving TED talk in September 2010. His work was featured in National Geographic and recently gave rise to an activist art project that aims to amplify voices of Indigenous communities. The short documentary Honor the Treaties (Mountainfilm 2013) is a portrait of Huey’s work on Pine Ridge. 

Tim Laman credits his childhood in Japan — where he had ready access to the mountains and oceans — for his strong interest in exploring nature, both above and below water. As a field biologist and wildlife photojournalist, his pioneering research in the rain forest canopy in Borneo led to a PhD from Harvard and his first National Geographic article in 1997. Since then, he has pursued his passion for exploring wild places and documenting little-known and endangered wildlife. Laman developed a reputation for capturing shots of nearly impossible subjects, such as gliding animals in Borneo, displaying birds of paradise and some of the most endangered birds in the world. He believes that promoting awareness through photography can make a difference in conservation.

Explorer, author and sustainability activist, Jason Lewis is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and The Explorers Club. In 2007, he became the first person to circumnavigate the Earth without the use of motors or sails, using a variety of modes of transportation to work his way around the world. The 46,505-mile journey took a total of 13 years to complete. Since completing his adventure, he uses human-powered travel as a way to talk about sustainability, visiting more than 900 schools in 37 countries to date and raising money for a variety of global nonprofits.

Max Lowe is a photographer, writer and National Geographic Young Explorer whohas been exploring the far reaches of the planet since before he could walk — from his home in the mountains of Montana to Antarctica, Nepal and Mongolia. He has been published in Backpacker magazine, Powder and on Nationalgeographic.com. After completing his Young Explorers Grant project, which documents social change in the Khumbu region of Nepal, Lowe served as a photo assistant for National Geographic’s Everest expedition. His writing and photos are included in National Geographic’s upcoming book The Call of Everest.

Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first about climate change that is written for a general audience. In 2009, he helped start the climate organization 350.org, which coordinated what Foreign Policy magazine called "the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind" with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. Time Magazine called him “the planet's best green journalist,” and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he is “probably the country's most important environmentalist.” McKibben presented at Mountainfilm for the first time in 2009.

Composer, multimedia artist and author Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, is known for his genre-bending art, vast catalogue of music and work in social justice. In addition to collaborating with musicians, such as Chuck D, Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono, Miller has travelled the world to perform solo, as well as with chamber groups and orchestras. He was the first artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and his work has appeared in the The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, The Venice Biennial for Architecture and other museums. Miller is currently the executive editor of Origin Magazine, which focuses on the intersection of art, yoga and new ideas. He is the author of Book of Ice, a multimedia, multidisciplinary study of Antarctica that contemplates climate change and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

An environmentalist, philosopher and writer, Kathleen Dean Moore is also Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University. Her writing weaves together essay and philosophy, focusing on moral obligation to our planet. Moore’s nature books have won the Oregon Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her work is also published in such publications as Orion, The New York Times Magazine and The Sun.

Daniel G. Nocera is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University and a leading scientist in the realm of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. The focus of his work has been to apply science to solving important societal problems — namely, providing energy for the world’s poorest people and cultivating sustainable energy supplies for the future. In that vein, he helped develop a potentially groundbreaking method for generating hydrogen from water using solar power, which is known as “artificial photosynthesis.” His “artificial leaf” — a device that mimics photosynthesis — is considered a milestone in the effort to create sustainable energy.

Alicia Nogueira is a Brazilian-born entrepreneur, artist and filmmaker who calls Telluride, Colorado, home. Nogueira studied film and video at Cal Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute before pursuing work in film, video art and sculpture. She moved to Telluride in 1993 and founded BaliDog.com, a yoga clothing company that features hand-painted designs. Her short film Woodsy, a portrait of locals who live mostly outdoors, premiered at Mountainfilm in 2010. Her recent paintings explore the enchanted worlds of light and shadow in our forests.

Timmy O’Neill has set world speed climbing records in Yosemite; established new routes in Patagonia, Venezuela and Greenland; and co-founded a nonprofit that is dedicated to providing inspiration, opportunities and adaptive equipment to the disabled community. He is a longtime guest of Mountainfilm. He starred in Front Range Freaks (Mountainfilm 2002), Brothers Wild (Mountainfilm 2010) with his brother Sean and was featured in 180 Degrees South (Mountainfilm 2010). He has recently been applying his skills toward a variety of humanitarian missions, such as kayaking to call attention to threatened rivers in Patagonia and working in Ethiopia to eradicate blindness with eye surgeon Geoff Tabin.

Terry Root is a scientist at Stanford University who studies the viability of species and populations. She works primarily on large-scale ecological questions with a focus on impacts of global warming. She strives to make scientific information accessible to decision makers and the public (e.g. being a lead author for IPCC Third and Fourth Assessment Reports), and her work played an active role in Tim DeChristopher’s decision to protest an oil and gas lease auction for which he served two years in federal prison. She was chosen as an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 1999, a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment in 1992, and earned a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990 from the National Science Foundation. She is also a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.

Marine ecologist Enric Sala fell in love with the sea while growing up on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Witnessing the harm people do to the oceans led him to dedicate his career to understanding and finding ways to mitigate human impacts on marine life. Sala engages in research, exploration, communication and conservation of marine ecosystems. His research aims to provide the information needed for policy change, and one of his goals is to protect the last pristine marine ecosystems of the world. To that end, he is leading a global marine conservation initiative at National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. 

Gabby Salazar received a camera from her father when she was 11 years old and was instantly hooked. She has been traveling the world since, documenting people, animals and incredible moments of light and nature. As a teenager, Salazar was named the BBC Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year and won the Nature’s Best Photography Youth Category. She graduated from Brown University in 2009 with a degree in Science and Technology Studies and currently works for the Nurture Nature Center, where she develops educational curriculum. She is also the president elect of the North American Nature Photography Association. Her work has taken her from Peru to South Africa and Indonesia with a focus on science, the environment and education.

Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, Auden Schendler is the author of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, a business book about the realities of implementing climate solutions and what it means to be “green.” His writing has been published in Harvard Business Review, the Los Angeles Times and Slate, and in 2006, his work earned him the title of Global Warming Innovator by Time. He lives in Basalt, Colorado, with his wife and two children. 

With photographer Tim Laman, Edwin Scholes became the first ornithologist to document all 39 species of birds of paradise, famed for their outlandish coloring and bizarre mating dances. He is a leading authority on their behavior and evolution. Scholes’ and Laman’s work is the basis of the National Geographic Museum’s “Amazing Avian Evolution” exhibit. Scholes works as the biodiversity video curator at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

Ecologist, author and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber is an internationally recognized authority on environmental links to cancer and human health. Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment presents cancer as a human rights issue. Originally published in 1997, it was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries. A documentary by the same name and about Steingraber and the book showed at Mountainfilm in 2012. Steingraber writes a regular column for Orion Magazine and has written several books, including Raising Elijah, about navigating children through a world fraught with environmental dangers. She has become a leading voice in the nation-wide battle against natural gas and fracking.

San Francisco artist David Tomb is a co-founder of Jeepney Projects Worldwide, an organization that uses art pieces to raise awareness about protecting endangered birds and creatures worldwide. Tomb is well-known for figurative portraits, but today the lifelong artist and self-proclaimed bird nerd combines his two passions with large-scale paintings of feathered creatures. His work can be found in many public collections and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times.

The first American to summit Everest, Jim Whittaker is an internationally renowned mountaineer, adventurer and environmentalist. Whittaker’s passion for the outdoors also spread to his business sense, and the legendary alpinist was the first full-time employee of Recreational Equipment, Inc. retiring as president and CEO after 25 years with the company. His diverse mountaineering experience includes the first American ascent of K2 in 1978 and leading the Mt. Everest Peace Climb in 1990. Beyond the world of mountaineering, Whittaker is an accomplished sailor, making a four-year, 20,000-mile Pacific sailing journey to Australia and back with his wife Dianne Roberts and their two sons.

Zio Ziegler is an emerging contemporary artist whose large-scale murals, paintings and works on paper have gained attention for their arresting mix of bold lines, primitive style and intricate tribal-like designs. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions on the West and East Coasts, and his large outdoor murals can be seen in highly trafficked areas of San Francisco. Ziegler studied at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated in 2010 with a B.A. in painting. Ziegler, who has a studio in his hometown of Mill Valley, California, is also the founder of Arte Sempre, a lifestyle and clothing brand that makes his art accessible to the public.