Meet the heroes leading our community of exploration.
We are all about the people who venture to the frontiers of human knowledge. At Hidden Compass, scientists, explorers, artists, and journalists are celebrated. Start by reading and sharing our stories. Go behind the scenes and meet the storytellers. Get involved and directly support their work with a contribution.
Featured Storytellers
Edmée van Rijn
Edmée van Rijn, born and raised in the Netherlands, is an experienced freelance camerawoman, editor, and producer working across the Middle East and beyond.
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Michele Bigley
Above all her accolades as a writer, activist, and teacher, Michele Bigley is most proud of her identity as a mother. Her two sons, Kai and Nikko, remind her every day that making the world a better place is the only work worth pursuing.
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Jennifer Billock
Jennifer Billock is an award-winning writer, best-selling author, and writing coach. She is currently dreaming of an around-the-world trip with her Boston terrier.
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Sugato Mukherjee
Sugato Mukherjee is a Kolkata, India-based photographer and writer whose work on the sulfur miners of East Java was recognized by UNESCO.
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Robert Annis
After spending nearly a decade as a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, Robert Annis finally broke free of the shackles of gainful employment and now freelances full-time, specializing in outdoor-travel journalism.
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Past Contributors
Tania Amochaev Romanov
Award-winning travel writer and photographer Tania Romanov made her first international trip at six months old — as a refugee — and hasn't stopped traveling since.
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Sonya Pevzner
Sonya Pevzner's experience as a queer Russian-Jewish refugee informs much of her work, from storytelling to activism.
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Keith Skinner
Keith Skinner is an award-winning writer who is endlessly curious about the why of things.
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Daniel Hudon
Daniel Hudon is a writer and educator based in Boston who likes to get lost in nature, particularly among old trees.
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Sugato Mukherjee
Sugato Mukherjee is a Kolkata, India-based photographer and writer whose work on the sulfur miners of East Java was recognized by UNESCO.
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Karen Green
Karen Green is a writer, mother, feminist, Canuck, and always up for a new journey and a hot coffee.
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Karen Burshtein
Karen Burshtein is an independent writer, editor, and translator who writes about all aspects of Canadian culture and history.
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Robert Holmes
From the 1975 British Everest Expedition to the vineyards of the world, Robert Holmes’ career as one of the world’s most successful and prolific travel photographers has extended more than 40 years.
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Don George
Author of "The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George," and of "How to Be a Travel Writer," the world's bestselling travel writing guide, Don George is a legendary travel writer and editor. He is currently Editor at Large for National Geographic Travel.
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Jacqueline Kehoe
Jacqueline writes about, thinks about, and photographs America's public lands.
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Lance Garland
Lance Garland fights fire in Seattle, climbs the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and sails the Salish Sea. In the moments between the action, he writes.
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Amanda Castleman
Despite her yoga and yogurt tendencies, author Amanda Castleman is a former wilderness guide who remains happiest when grubbing around in nature.
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Lavanya Sunkara
Lavanya Sunkara is a New York City-based writer who focuses on sustainable travel, conservation, and adventure.
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Jenna Scatena
Jenna Scatena is an independent journalist based in Istanbul and San Francisco, whose work explores the intersection of place and culture.
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Jennifer Billock
Jennifer Billock is an award-winning writer, best-selling author, and writing coach. She is currently dreaming of an around-the-world trip with her Boston terrier.
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Erhan Kahveci
Erhan Kahveci is a Milan-based documentary photographer driven by a desire to see people and the hidden parts of the world, and capture society through his images.
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Richard Pallardy
Richard Pallardy is a freelance science writer. He is endlessly fascinated by the behavior and evolution of living things. By writing about these subjects, he hopes to draw attention to their importance — and to the joy that this knowledge can bring to everyday life.
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Maggie Scotilla
After leaving an art program to pursue psychology — and after nearly 20 years away from drawing — Maggie Scotilla took a pen and ink class in 2017 and rediscovered her passion for making art.
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Anna Elkins
Anna Elkins is a traveling poet and painter who has lived in the shadows of the Rockies and the Alps, and on the shores of the Caribbean and Micronesian seas.
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Clara Milo
Clara Milo is a photographer and filmmaker who creates surrealist universes to better understand the world around her.
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Krishan Coupland
Krishan Coupland earned an MA in creative writing, won the Manchester Fiction Prize, and is unduly preoccupied with theme parks.
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Diane Selkirk
Diane Selkirk is a traveler who believes the best moments come when you toss away the bucket list and follow your own curiosity to adventure.
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Mike Bernhardt
When Mike Bernhardt isn’t traveling or writing about it, he can be found cooking Thai food, swing dancing, hanging out with his wife Yvonne, and always enjoying his retirement from a career in IT.
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Garrett Martin
Garrett Martin is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photographer, and conservationist who's proud to call southern Appalachia his home.
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Victoria Sanderson
Victoria Sanderson is a restless writer always googling new adventures.
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Shannon Donaghy
Shannon Donaghy is a queer poet, writer, and world traveler from Philadelphia, PA.
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James Michael Dorsey
James Michael Dorsey is an award-winning author, and explorer, who has spent decades documenting vanishing cultures in Africa and Asia.
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Allison Smith
Allison Nicole Smith is a New York City-based freelance writer, as well as a student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she is learning how to not use the Oxford comma.
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Jeff Greenwald
Oakland-based Jeff Greenwald remains either the world's most obscure well-known travel writer, or the best-known obscure travel writer.
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Hayli Nicole
Hayli Nicole is a perpetual traveler, collector of stories, and lover of all things mundane.
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Valerie Stimac
Valerie Stimac is an Oakland-based space tourism and travel writer who has spent time living in Alaska, London, and the Pacific Northwest.
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Henry Sharpe
Henry Sharpe is a Canadian illustrator and paleontology student with a penchant for hiking in Crocs.
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Yasaswini Sampathkumar
Yasaswini Sampathkumar is a writer and recovering scientist who's learning to be as sustainable as her grandmother.
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Michele Bigley
Above all her accolades as a writer, activist, and teacher, Michele Bigley is most proud of her identity as a mother. Her two sons, Kai and Nikko, remind her every day that making the world a better place is the only work worth pursuing.
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Dr. Gilad Fiskus
Dr. Gilad Fiskus is a cultural photographer whose career as a dentist influences the way he photographs people as he travels the world.
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Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee
Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee is a wordmonger, conceptual artist, sharer of food, and professional accidentalist. You might catch a glimpse of her climbing a mountain, planting seeds, running in waves, baking cake, or staring at clouds — laughing all the while.
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Kelly A. Harrison
Kelly A. Harrison, losing track of all the amazing things she's done, thanks the gods for digital photos and Adobe products.
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Sabine K. Bergmann
Sabine K. Bergmann is the co-founder and co-CEO of Hidden Compass. She’s also an award-winning journalist whose cinematic stories invite readers to explore places and characters who connect us to the grand tapestry of human wisdom, kinship, and purpose.
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Morgan Tilton
Molded and catalyzed by natural environments, Morgan Tilton is a creative writer and reporter fueled by snowfall, shooting stars, and Nuun hydration tablets. She specializes in outdoor industry news, adventure travel, and stories of human endurance.
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Shoshi Parks
Shoshi Parks is an anthropologist turned writer of the quirky and fascinating.
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Jordan Ranft
Jordan Ranft is a writer and behavioral healthcare worker from the Bay Area. He enjoys writing about arts, culture, the environment, and the strange and oftentimes unnerving intersection between societal artifice and the natural world.
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Melissa Banigan
Melissa is a journalist and photographer with work in the Washington Post, BBC Travel, and NPR, among many others.
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Liz Shemaria
Liz Shemaria is a founding editor at Hidden Compass, an award-winning journalist, and a third-generation Northern Californian who has trekked solo in the Himalaya, interviewed artists in military-ruled Burma, and rode an overnight train across Egypt on her birthday.
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Nicholas Bratton
Nicholas is a lifelong adventurer and traveler with a knack for finding unexpected ways into unusual situations — like guest DJ-ing on Zambian national radio.
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Jennifer Simonson
Jennifer is a Texas-based writer who travels in search of good conversation, tasty ice cream, fast water slides, and harsh moonshine.
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Russell Bradley
Russell's parents threw him in the ocean when he was five years old. He cried for a minute but then never got out. He's a marine biologist, improviser, storyteller, writer, and nature lover.
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Hudson Lindenberger
Hudson Lindenberger lives to tell the stories that describe life, whatever they may be.
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Alison Konecki
Alison Konecki crusades for the arts by day, writes by night, and travels as often as possible.
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Laine Gonzales
Laine Gonzales is a biologist and high school science teacher. When school is not in session, she’s typically on the road.
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Kelsey Camacho
Kelsey Camacho focuses on identity and landscape in the Arctic. She's also training for her first dogsledding race.
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Rachel Pieh Jones
Rachel Pieh Jones writes about life at the crossroads of faith and culture. Her work is influenced by living in the Horn of Africa, raising Third Culture Kids, and adventurous exploration of the natural world.
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Janna Brancolini
Janna Brancolini is an American journalist based in Milan, Italy. She is drawn to stories where law meets politics, where the environment intersects with finance, where cultures clash, and where languages collide.
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Lottie Gross
Lottie Gross is an award-winning travel writer and editor from south Oxfordshire, England, who has traveled the world updating guidebooks in India and reporting on community projects in Uganda.
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Barbara Barrielle
Traveling and writing full-time (until COVID!), Barbara Barrielle writes about wine and travel and is an equal opportunity traveler. She loves to go everywhere and meet the locals, the heart of travel.
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Louisa Deasey
Louisa Deasey is a Francophile based in Melbourne, Australia who makes up for it by drinking coffee from a soup-sized bowl each morning.
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Edmée van Rijn
Edmée van Rijn, born and raised in the Netherlands, is an experienced freelance camerawoman, editor, and producer working across the Middle East and beyond.
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Moriah Costa
Moriah Costa is a freelance journalist and editor by day and an artist by night.
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Erin Byrne
Erin Byrne's books, travel essays, poetry, fiction, films, workshops, and events capture the mystical transformations unleashed by travel and connections across the globe.
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Alex Krowiak
Alex Krowiak is a San Diego–based photojournalist and expedition guide working to tell stories of people, nature, and the changing relationship between the two.
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Will Cordeiro
Will Cordeiro cannot drive a car; is not on social media; and may or may not be a human.
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Chase Nelson
Chase Nelson is a poet-explorer who likes howling at the moon, skinny dipping in alpine lakes, and laughing until it hurts at big tables full of strangers in foreign lands.
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Emilienne Malfatto
Emilienne Malfatto is an award-winning photojournalist covering post-conflict and social issues, mostly in Iraq.
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Robert Annis
After spending nearly a decade as a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, Robert Annis finally broke free of the shackles of gainful employment and now freelances full-time, specializing in outdoor-travel journalism.
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Kori Perten
Kori Perten is a writer and editor based in the Boston area—when she’s not traveling the globe, that is.
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Gemina Garland-Lewis
Gemina Garland-Lewis is a Pacific Northwest and Baja CA Sur-based photographer, scientist, and explorer whose work explores human-animal-environment relationships around the globe. She is a lover of the outdoors, curiosity, and cheese.
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Ashley Seashore
Ashley Seashore is a Marin County-based writer who wears flip flops with abandon.
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Colin Daileda
Colin Daileda is a freelance journalist in Bengaluru, India, who has written for a lot of places, often about social justice and environmental degradation, and would like to either win the lottery or get someone to pay him a million dollars to write a book.
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Russell Frank
As a writer and a writing instructor, Russell Frank’s mission in life is to foster appreciation of a keen observation, a well-turned phrase, and a correctly used apostrophe.
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Lola Akinmade Åkerström
Lola Akinmade Åkerström is a visual storyteller who explores culture through food, tradition, and lifestyles.
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Brandon McWilliams
Brandon McWilliams is a writer, outdoor educator, and college student who tells stories to encourage people to think about how they treat the world around them.
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Annelise Jolley
Annelise Jolley is a San Diego-based journalist and essayist who writes about food, travel, and the terrain between.
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Martha Ezell
Martha Ezell is a freelance writer based in Petaluma, California. After careers in documentary filmmaking and academic technology, she now devotes her time to writing and travel.
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Elaine J. Masters
Ever curious and hungry for adventure, Elaine Masters can't resist ducking into doorways and pulling over on the side of the road in pursuit of a story.
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Sivani Babu
Sivani Babu is the co-founder, co-CEO, and creative director of Hidden Compass. By merging journalism, art, and exploration, she tells stories that offer perspective, context, and an awe-inspiring sense of scale to the human experience.
View ProfileOrganizations We Support
Committee to Protect Journalists
Our mission is to celebrate journalists. This means it is our responsibility to help make the world safer for them. The Committee to Protect Journalists is a nonprofit dedicated to protecting journalists globally, defending their rights, and fighting for freedom of the press. Their emergency response team provides life-saving support to journalists in peril.
Learn MoreStoryCorps
We believe stories have the power to bring people together. This can only happen when those stories are collected, shared, and preserved. To date, StoryCorps has gathered and recorded the stories of more than half a million people to remind us of our shared humanity, nurture compassion, and preserve a historical record for future generations.
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Photo: Jacqueline Kehoe