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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 occasionally using unicorn metaphors to explain the realities of sentencing to 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 a broken neck and a concussion while sailing through a lightning storm in the Bermuda Triangle. Sivani is working on her first book, Saving the Night: Shedding Light on the Importance of Darkness.

Sabine 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 more than 21 million. As an editor, she has managed content for travel companies valued at more than $500 million. Her writing has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe, North Africa, and North America. 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. She has battled dengue in the Peace Corps, descended 12,000 vertical feet on a bike in a single day, and inadvertently partnered with cocaine-smuggling fishermen in the Caribbean. Sabine is currently at work on her first book. Learn more at www.sabinekbergmann.com.

Katie Knorovsky is the Managing Editor of Hidden Compass. She forged her journalism career at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. As an editor at National Geographic Traveler, she championed the expertise of the Society’s constellation of global explorers, from space archaeologists to glaciologists, and shaped stories on places ranging from the Ozarks to the Azores. In 2014 she heeded the call of the Blue Ridge Mountains and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where she immersed herself in the cultural complexities of her new home as the Managing Editor of a magazine dedicated to Southern Appalachia. Her writing credits include bylines for NationalGeographic.com, the Washington Post, the Local Palate, and National Geographic books. She holds a magazine journalism degree from Drake University in her native Iowa, and, many years ago, spent a suntanned spring studying French in Cannes. Happiest when exploring on two feet or two wheels, Katie has hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim, braved the traffic-choked streets of Buenos Aires by bike, floated in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon with her preschool-age son during sideways rain, and shared breakfast with Guatemalan schoolchildren on the edge of Central America’s largest garbage dump.

T.W. Anderson is the Marketing Manager of Hidden Compass. He spent a decade in the travel media space as a public speaker, writer, photographer, videographer, and marketing specialist. During that time he worked with some of the world’s leading tourism boards, such as Costa Brava, Failte Ireland, Cancun, and Puerto Vallarta, as well as major travel companies including TripAdvisor, Oyster, HomeAway, Airbnb, and Eurail. When not working with Hidden Compass, Tim builds fantastical worlds as the creative director of the Saga of Lucima MMORPG (plus the author of the book series), and the CEO of Stormhaven Studios, LLC in Austin, Texas. He is based in Mexico City.

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.