Speakers Bureau

Inspire, Challenge, Motivate

National Geographic Speakers Bureau represents the world’s boldest Explorers, scientists, photographers and storytellers. These tailor-made experiences inspire, challenge and motivate audiences — from dynamic corporate keynotes to unforgettable gala evenings. Contact us today to bring the world to your private event.

Available Speakers

Showing 9 of 46 results

Alicia Odewale

Resilience, Culture, Storytelling

Alicia Odewale (Ware) was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is the great grandniece of Robert Ware, who attended Dunbar Grade School in Greenwood and survived the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. She is also a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School, a historically Black high school created during Oklahoma’s Jim Crow era and one of the few structures that survived the attack on Greenwood in 1921. She earned her college degrees at Westminster College and The University of Tulsa (TU), and in 2016 made history as the first person of African descent to receive a doctorate in anthropology at TU. She was also the first Black faculty member to join TU’s department of anthropology and today continues to work as an archaeologist and educator in Oklahoma, specializing in African Diaspora archaeology in the Caribbean and southeastern United States with a theoretical focus on community-centered, restorative justice, anti-racist and Black feminist archaeology. Since 2014, Odewale has been researching archaeological sites related to Afro-Caribbean heritage on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and since 2019 has been researching sites of Black heritage in her home state of Oklahoma. Her latest research project, “Mapping Historical Trauma in Tulsa from 1921-2021,” is co-created with other Tulsans and seeks to reanalyze historical evidence from the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, launch new community-based archaeological investigations in the Historic Greenwood District, and use radical mapping techniques to visualize the impact of the massacre through time on the landscape of Greenwood. Odewale joined the National Geographic family in 2021 as a speaker with National Geographic Live through her show entitled “Greenwood: A Century of Resilience”. She also accepted the invitation to become a community leader through National Geographic’s 2892 Miles to Go: Geographic Walk for Justice Project. Both projects provide an opportunity for her to go beyond the classroom and share her research in new and innovative ways with the world. Her research interests include the archaeology of enslavement and freedom in urban contexts, Caribbean archaeology, rural and urban comparative analyses, community-based archaeology, ceramic analysis, transferware studies, mapping historical trauma from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, restorative justice and auto-archaeology, and investigations into different forms of anti-slavery resistance. She is also the co-creator of the Greenwood Archaeology Curriculum and the #TulsaSyllabus, an online resource guide that dives into the history and archaeology of Black enslavement, land ownership, anti-Black violence, and the rise of prosperous Black communities in Oklahoma. Her research has received awards and support from the National Geographic Society, the American Anthropological Association, the National Science Foundation, the Society of Historical Archaeology, the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, and the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS).

Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Photography, Resilience, Storytelling, Teamwork, Adventure, Culture, Health

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British-Swedish photojournalist who has contributed to National Geographic magazine and other leading editorial publications. She is also an author, poet, TED Fellow and 2016 Harvard Nieman Fellow. Taylor-Lind has worked in Ukraine for over a decade, covering issues relating to women, war and violence. Her first book, "MAIDAN - Portraits from the Black Square," documents the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution and was published by GOST Books the same year. Her poetry focuses on contemporary conflicts and the experiences she cannot photograph. In 2022, her first collection, "One Language," was published in the U.K. by Smith|Doorstop. In 2023, she received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her long-term reporting from eastern Ukraine, and over 100,000 people visited her exhibition 'Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline' at the Imperial War Museum.

Andy Mann

Storytelling, Photography, Wildlife, Climate Change, Adventure

Andy Mann is an experienced climber, diver, and filmmaker whose imagery helps tell the story of our rapidly changing planet, documenting scientific expeditions on all seven continents. He is the co-founder and director at 3 Strings Productions and is a founding member of the Sea Legacy Collective with Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier. He now spends more than 100 days each year at sea documenting cutting-edge marine science.

Ariel Waldman

Adventure, Climate Change, Leadership, Science, Space, Storytelling

Ariel Waldman is a National Geographic Explorer and filmmaker. Her expeditions take her from tallgrass prairies and deep-sea canyons to the icy realms of Antarctica. In these remarkable places, she films otherworldly life beneath the surface, including the extraordinary lives of microscopic animals. Waldman is the creator and host of "UNEARTHED," an ongoing series on PBS that breaks open the boundaries of nature documentaries, exploring everything from microscopic creatures to the planet's most iconic animals—and even the possibilities of life beyond Earth. Waldman is also a TED speaker and author. For over a decade, she has served as an advisor to NASA on astrobiology, human spaceflight and advanced technologies. In 2013, she was honored by the Obama White House as a "Champion of Change" for her work in citizen science. She lives in San Francisco, California, and enjoys collaborating with researchers to illuminate the unseen corners of our world.

Barton Seaver

Adventure, Climate Change, Culture, Health, Resilience, Storytelling, Sustainability

Barton Seaver is a chef who has dedicated his career to restoring the relationship we have with our ocean. It is his belief that the choices we are making for dinner are directly impacting the ocean and its fragile ecosystems. Seaver has manned the helm of some of Washington, D.C.’s most acclaimed restaurants. In doing so, he brought the idea of sustainable seafood to the nation’s capitol while earning Esquire magazine’s 2009 “Chef of the Year” status from acclaimed food writer John Mariani. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Seaver has cooked in cities all over America and the world. Having been bitten by the travel bug, Seaver found work in southern Spain at a small family restaurant. Their casual, ingredient-based cooking style would prove to be an important influence in his perception of food as an essential part of community. When the off-season arrived, Seaver hopped on a boat to Morocco and landed in the small seaside village of Essaouira. There, he took part in generations-old fishing methods, becoming a part of a community whose survival was directly linked to the oceans. This had a huge impact on his belief that sustainability is, at its root, not only an ecological matter, but also a humanitarian one. While sustainability has largely been assigned to seafood and agriculture, Barton’s work expands far beyond the dining table to encompass socio-economic and cultural issues. Locally, he pursues solutions to these problems through D.C. Central Kitchen, an organization fighting hunger not with food, but with personal empowerment, job training, and life skills. Barton has been lauded as a leader in sustainability by the Seafood Choices Alliance and was named a fellow with the Blue Ocean Institute. Barton has joined the board of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment. Together with National Geographic, the Center is partnering with hospitals and health care providers in the Greater Boston area to educate them about healthier and more sustainable food service opportunities. He is the author of For Cod And Country (Sterling, Spring 2011), a book of recipes that inspires ocean conservation through the experience that we all share—dinner. In addition, Barton is working on television and online shows that will engage consumers by telling stories everyone can relate to, whether they are preparing a meal or preparing to eat it.

Bob Poole

Adventure, Conservationism, Photography, Science, Storytelling, Wildlife, Resilience

Bob Poole is an Emmy Award winning Director of Photography, Television Presenter and Speaker. He has an extensive credit list with BBC, PBS NATURE, NOVA, Discovery Networks, and an additional 50 plus films for National Geographic. Growing up in East Africa, Bob experienced an extraordinary childhood exploring the wilderness and wildlife that thrived there in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His unique upbringing gave him an appreciation and curiosity of the natural world, a highly adventurous spirit, and a strong sense of self-reliance. Poole’s career began in his teens on a film about elephants for National Geographic. He is a Fellow with the Explorers Club and has spoken in over 50 venues across the US, Canada and Australia, filling concert halls including Benaroya in Seattle and the Sydney Opera House. His recent work has taken him to one of Africa’s harshest climates to film desert elephants in Namibia for a four-part series by James Cameron, narrated by Natalie Portman, for National Geographic called Secrets of the Elephants, currently streaming on Disney+.Bob’s most film as Director of Photography is Tusker: The Brotherhood of Elephants has just premiered on PBS Nature, YouTube, Hulu and AppleTV. He is currently speaking in venues across the US.

Brian J. Skerry

Wildlife, Photography, Conservationism, Science, Adventure, Climate Change, Leadership, Resilience, Storytelling, Sustainability, Teamwork

Brian Skerry is a film producer/director and veteran photojournalist specializing in marine wildlife and underwater realms. His recent documentary film credits include "Secrets of the Whales" and "Return of the White Shark," both currently streaming on Disney+. In 2021, Skerry received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary as a producer of "Secrets of the Whales." Since 1998, Skerry has been a contributing photographer for National Geographic magazine, where he has created and photographed more than 30 feature stories, including seven cover stories. His work has also been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paris Match, Esquire, and Audubon. In 2014 he was named as a National Geographic Society Photography Fellow and then named a National Geographic Society Storytelling Fellow in 2017 - the same year he was awarded the title of Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. In 2016, he received the National Geographic magazine's Photographer’s Photographer Award, a recognition bestowed by his colleagues, other National Geographic magazine photographers. Skerry was named the 2025 Nature Photographer of the Year by the North American Nature Photographers Association. Skerry is the author of 12 books including the acclaimed monographs "Ocean Soul," "SHARK" and "Secrets of the Whales."

Caitie Barrett

Culture, Science, Storytelling

Caitlín Eilís (Caitie) Barrett is an archaeologist who studies everyday life and cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. She is a professor of classics at Cornell University. She also co-directs an archaeological excavation at Pompeii: the Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project, which explores the ways that Roman houses and gardens shaped their inhabitants’ lived experiences. Her areas of specialization include Mediterranean and Egyptian archaeology, household archaeology, the archaeology of religion and ritual and interactions between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world in antiquity. In addition to her current fieldwork at Pompeii, she has also excavated and surveyed a range of Bronze Age through early modern sites in Egypt, Greece and the United States. Barrett earned her Ph.D. from Yale and her Bachelor of Arts from Harvard. She is the author of two books: "Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion" (Brill, 2011) and "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as numerous scholarly articles. She is the recipient of grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation (two-time recipient), Dumbarton Oaks, the International Catacomb Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Rust Family Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Archaeological Institute of America and Sigma Xi. In exploring the material remains of the past, she seeks to better understand some of the most profoundly human aspects of life at Pompeii: the daily experiences, activities and sensations that made up people’s lives.

Caitlin E. O'Connell-Rodwell

Wildlife, Science, Photography, Storytelling, Conservationism

Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell is a behavioral ecologist who has studied elephant society within Etosha National Park, Namibia, for over 30 years. Her National Geographic Society-funded project started in 2002, when she began measurements of the seismic properties of elephant low frequency vocalizations and the elephants’ ability to detect these vibrations as signals. The scope of her work expanded beyond acoustic and seismic studies to a broad look at how an elephant society is organized in an arid environment. O’Connell-Rodwell's journey as a scientist began as an undergraduate majoring in biology, which led to a master’s degree in animal communication, studying the role communication plays in species isolation mechanisms in the Hawaiian Islands. From there, she traveled through southern Africa for a year and accepted a three-year contract with the Namibian Government, working with farmers in rural Zambezi to help them manage the elephant/human interface in the region, along with studying elephant ecology and behavior and particularly their vocal communication. That work formed the basis of her dissertation research at University of California, Davis, where she obtained a Ph.D. in ecology. O’Connell-Rodwell then took on a postdoc at Stanford University in the Center for Conservation Biology to study ivory trade policy based in China, realizing her passion lay in studying African elephants in the wild. O’Connell-Rodwell and her husband co-founded a nonprofit organization, Utopia Scientific, in 2002. She has published numerous books and scientific and popular feature articles about her research, including features in Scientific American, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and Aeon Magazine. She has given two TED talks and many public lectures around the world, including several countries in Europe, as well as China, Australia and Africa. She was voted Distinguished Young Alumna at UC Davis, and won the Sibert and Horn Book Honors for her co-authored book, "The Elephant Scientist." O’Connell-Rodwell is currently working on several documentaries, storytelling and speaking engagements to help further instill an awe of nature in budding scientists and nature lovers.

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