Sivani Babu is the co-founder and CEO 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 COO 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.

Nicolette Holmes is the Alliance Relations Manager and 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.

Katie Knorovsky is Editor at Large at Hidden Compass. Previously, she was the magazine’s first Managing Editor.

Katie forged her journalism career at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. As an editor of the now defunct print edition of 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.

Her writing credits include bylines for such publications as National Geographic Magazine, the Washington Post, the Washingtonian, the Local Palate, and as a contributor to an array of travel books published by National Geographic and Wildsam Field Guides.

She holds a magazine journalism degree from Drake University in her native Iowa and studied language and culture at a French learning institute in Cannes, France.

Katie lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she manipulates words and threads as a writer and fiber artist. She also shares her love of language and cultural exchange as an English literacy tutor for the local immigrant and refugee community.

Pier Nirandara is the Storyteller in Residence at Hidden Compass. Pier began her career as Thailand’s youngest author of three bestselling novels, multiple graphic novels, and short stories with over 200,000 copies sold in multiple languages. Since then, she has represented literary clients at ICM Partners, served as Director of Development at Sony Columbia Pictures, and as VP of Film & TV at A-Major Media, Hollywood’s first Asian American-driven production company.

A TEDx speaker and literary ambassador for the Bangkok Metropolitan/UNESCO, Pier has won two Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing of the Year, two Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers, and Gold at the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference 2023.

Pier is also a PADI AmbassaDiver™ and the founder of Immersiv Expeditions, where she leads trips to swim with marine wildlife. Her photography has been recognized by competitions including Ocean Photographer of the Year, and she was awarded the 2023 Ocean Storytelling Photography Grant by the Save Our Seas Foundation. An advocate for solo female travel, she has visited over 100 countries across seven continents, and can be found in Los Angeles, Cape Town, and on Instagram @piersgreatperhaps.

Marisa Larson is the fact-checker at Hidden Compass. Her lifelong love of learning and travel has fueled her career as a journalist and fact-checker, working for television, radio and magazine outlets, including as a senior editorial researcher and the Middle East regional editor at National Geographic.

Marisa’s first international experience was representing Kansas youth through the People-to-People American Soviet Youth Exchange in 1988. That experience sparked her desire to explore and learn about cultures firsthand. She graduated from Kansas State University with degrees in political science and journalism and a master’s in youth development. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, Marisa worked with women in the Anti-Atlas Mountains to improve their lives through animal husbandry — knowledge she’d gained raising cattle in Kansas. After years of living abroad and in Washington, D.C., Marisa is now back in her home state of Kansas, living with her son, her mother, two
dogs, and three cats.

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. 

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.