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Sivani Babu is the co-founder, co-CEO, and creative director of Hidden Compass. She is an award-winning journalist and nature photographer who has contributed to BBC Travel, CNN, Backpacker, Outdoor Photographer, Iron Horse Literary Review, and numerous other publications. Her work has been recognized in the Best American Travel Writing series and has appeared in exhibits from San Diego to the Sorbonne. Sivani graduated from the University of Chicago with three majors — economics, public policy studies, and political science — and one Lazarused newspaper, the Chicago Weekly News. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she taught high schoolers about their constitutional rights. As a Teach for America corps member, she taught eighth-graders about the tangency of math and literacy. After working on a Supreme Court case and representing hundreds of indigent criminal defendants, Sivani left her career as a federal public defender to sail across the most brutal sea on earth. Since then, she has chased storms through Tornado Alley, searched for polar bears in the Arctic Circle, and survived serious injury while celestially navigating the Bermuda Triangle. Sivani is working on her first book, Saving the Night: Shedding Light on the Importance of Darkness.

Sabine K. Bergmann is the co-founder and co-CEO of Hidden Compass. As an award-winning travel, science, and nature writer, she has contributed stories to dozens of publications — including WIRED, Sierra Magazine, and The Best Travel Writing book series — with a collective readership of tens of millions of readers. Her writing has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe, North Africa, and North America. As an editor, she has managed content for travel companies valued at more than $500 million.

Sabine is a Stanford University-trained environmental researcher and community coordinator who has worked on conservation projects from the Amazon Basin to the Great Barrier Reef. In 2009, she represented Stanford University climate researchers at the United Nations. From 2011-2013, she was the co-host of a live-broadcast environmental radio show in Spanish with an audience of 100,000. She has interviewed sources at sea in a tropical storm, escaped political unrest in the Andes, and discovered cocaine-smuggling coverups in the Caribbean. She has also interviewed earthquake survivors and astrophysicists, mountain biked from the Andes to the Amazon, and chronicled oral traditions passed down through millennia of indigenous history. Headshot by In Her Image Photography. Learn more at www.sabinekbergmann.com.

Alexa Highsmith is the Alliance Coordinator at Hidden Compass. As a journalist and creative, her pieces are featured in publications such as LumArtZine, The Horizon Newspaper, and Mazing Magazine. Her work covers a range of topics including reflections on travel through liminal spaces, analysis of art and music, and the prominence of coffee and tea’s cultural significance. 

Alexa graduated from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, with a degree in English and Music. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University. 

In 2018, Alexa embarked on an expedition to the United Kingdom, Ireland, and surrounding countries to further her literary and musical studies. She has trekked across abandoned famine walls in Northern Ireland, played traditional Irish fiddle music in Ceili night gatherings, toured Hungary giving violin recitals in music-school-converted synagogues, and traversed the wild and relentless moors of the Bronte Parsonage. 

Liz Shemaria is Founding Editor at Hidden Compass. She is an award-winning journalist who has contributed to dozens of publications and organizations including BBC Travel, AFAR, Human Rights Watch, and Fodor’s Essential Italy guidebooks. Liz graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in journalism. In 2008, she won a fellowship to produce a multimedia series about artistic censorship in military-ruled Burma — traveling undercover between the Thai-Burma border while smuggling rolled-up paintings in her backpack. She launched AOL’s first hyperlocal news startup in California in 2010 and was an on-camera spokesperson for the American Red Cross from 2011-2013. She has trekked solo to an 8,000-ft peak in the Himalaya, traveled through Egypt on a night train, and spent 36 hours crossing the Aegean Sea on a boat, so she could take a picture of her family’s name on a building on the island of Rhodes. She lives in Italy, where she has learned to never order a cappuccino after breakfast.

Nicolette Holmes is the Digital Marketing Manager at Hidden Compass. As a dual citizen of the US and Ireland, Nicolette recalls being curious about different cultures, and the way they experience the world, from a young age. After graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder with a degree in Psychology and double-minors in Business and Religious Studies, she leaped at the opportunity to pursue a marketing career in Portugal. In her previous role at a Lisbon-based digital marketing firm, Nicolette was responsible for managing the agency’s international client portfolio and worked directly with brands from Denmark to Russia to Kuwait. When she’s not on her laptop crafting a digital marketing strategy or plotting her next international adventure, you can find her practicing yoga, studying yoga philosophy, or admiring an ocean sunset in one of the two place she calls home — Portugal and California.

Vivian Walman-Randall is the Submissions Manager at Hidden Compass. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been published in The Catalyst Literary Arts Magazine and Spectrum Summer Editions, and she was awarded the Richardson Poetry Prize in 2021. She’s had the privilege of presenting her scholarly research and creative work at the UCSB’s 2020 Research and Creative Activities Conference, the CCCC Undergraduate Poster Session, and The Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium. Her creative work and research focus on the intersections between gender and nature, as well as addressing climate change and climate catastrophe while exploring new possibilities for relationships between people and the environment. Her research is also concerned with creative writing pedagogy and the development of generative workshop models. She graduated with her B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from The College of Creative Studies at UCSB in 2022, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing with a Fiction Emphasis at Emerson College. Alongside working for Hidden Compass, she is also the Chief of Staff at Emerson College’s graduate journal, Redivider, and teaches undergraduate composition.