Wild Life

Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are Academy® Award-winning filmmakers. The two are the directors and producers of “Free Solo,” an intimate, unflinching portrait of rock climber Alex Honnold, which was awarded a BAFTA and the Academy® Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. Their first film together, “Meru,” won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and was on the 2016 Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature. More recently, they directed the BAFTA and DGA-nominated documentary “The Rescue,” chronicling the against-all-odds rescue of twelve boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand. Other projects include “Return to Space,” about SpaceX and NASA’s first joint spaceflight, which hit the top 10 on Netflix’s most watched films list, and the National Geographic series “Edge of the Unknown With Jimmy Chin”. Chin and Vasarhelyi are currently working on their first scripted feature for Netflix, “Nyad”, about Diana Nyad's swim from Cuba to Florida.

Vasarhelyi’s other films as a director include “Incorruptible” (Truer Than Fiction Independent Spirit Award 2016); “Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love” (Oscilloscope, 2009), which premiered at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals; “A Normal Life” (Tribeca Film Festival, Best Documentary 2003); and “Touba” (SXSW, Special Jury Prize Best Cinematography in 2013). Vasarhelyi has directed two New York Times Op Docs, two episodes for Netflix’s nonfiction design series “Abstract” and two episodes for ESPN’s nonfiction series “Enhanced.” She has received grants from the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bertha Britdoc, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a member of the DGA, the AMPAS, and holds a B.A. in comparative literature from Princeton University.

Jimmy Chin is also a National Geographic photographer and professional climber and skier who has led and documented cutting-edge expeditions around the world for over 20 years. He has climbed and skied Mount Everest from the summit and made the coveted first ascent of the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru. His photographs have graced the covers of National Geographic Magazine and the New York Times Magazine and his first book of photography, There and Back, became a New York Times Best Seller in 2021. Vasarhelyi and Chin split their time between New York City and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with their daughter, Marina, and son, James.

Bob Eisenhardt is a filmmaker renowned for editing documentaries and a frequent LMF collaborator. He is an Oscar® nominee, a four-time Emmy® winner, and a two-time winner of the Eddie Award from the honorary society of American Cinema Editors. He has over 60 films to his credit. His film, “Spaces: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” was an Academy Award® nominee for Best Short Documentary. Eisenhardt edited “Free Solo,” the 2019 Oscar and BAFTA award winner, for which he received the ACE Eddie for Best Editing - Documentary. Other recent films include “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood”; “Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan,” shown at the 2016 New York Film Festival; and HBO’s “Everything Is Copy: Nora Ephron, Scripted and Unscripted,” shown at the 2015 New York Film Festival, a Primetime Emmy nominee, and winner of ACE Eddie for Best Editing – TV Documentary. Other films include “Wagner's Dream,” which received an Emmy nomination for editing; “Meru,” Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner; “Valentino: The Last Emperor”; “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing”; “Living Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders”; and “Concert of Wills: Making of Getty Center.” When not in the edit room, Eisenhardt teaches at the School of Visual Arts MFA Program and the thesis master class at the New York Film Academy.

Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation. She is an American conservationist and the former CEO of Patagonia, Inc. For three decades, she has committed to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation.

Kristine and her late husband, Douglas Tompkins, have protected approximately 14.8 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, making them among the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history.

Through Tompkins Conservation and its offspring organizations, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, she has helped to create or expand 15 national parks in Argentina and Chile, including two marine national parks. She also works to bring back species that have gone locally or nationally extinct, such as the jaguar, red-and-green macaw, and giant river otters in Northeast Argentina, and Darwin’s rheas and extremely endangered huemul deer in Chile.

Kristine served as Patron for Protected Areas for the UN Environmental Programme from 2018-2022. The recipient of numerous honors, she was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Her 2020 TED Talk, "Let's Make the World Wild Again," has over 2 million views.