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CHRIS ECKSTROM is a writer, videographer, and producer. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she grew up in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and New England.
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she is the author of Forgotten Edens: Exploring the World's Wild Places (National Geographic Books), and has contributed to numerous books published by National Geographic, where she worked as a staff writer for 15 years. Field assignments have taken her to all seven continents to cover subjects ranging from wildlife in Zambia to a profile of Brazil's Pantanal, the world's largest wetland. Her stories have appeared in National Geographic Magazine, Audubon, International Wildlife, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications. She collaborated with her husband and partner, photographer Frans Lanting, to write and edit Life: A Journey Through Time (Taschen 2006), and to realize Life as an interactive website, a traveling exhibition, and a multimedia orchestral performance with music by Philip Glass. Led by Maestra Marin Alsop, the musical version of Life premiered at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California in 2006, then traveled to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Genoa, Italy, with additional performances scheduled in North America and Europe.
Chris and Frans also teamed up to write and edit a number of books including Jungles (Taschen 2001), Penguin (Taschen 1999), Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters With the Animal World (Taschen 1997), and Okavango, Africa's Last Eden (Chronicle Books 1993). Chris was the editor for “Ideas and Images,” a collaboration between Barry Lopez and Frans Lanting. She also edits "World View," Frans Lanting’s column for Outdoor Photographer.
Chris and Frans have worked together for nearly two decades on fieldwork from the Amazon to Mongolia. Beginning in 1989, book and magazine projects have taken them from Borneo to Botswana to the jungles of Peru. They have produced photographic workshops in East Africa, Alaska, Antarctica, Greenland, the Galapagos, and their hometown of Santa Cruz, California.
In 1998 Chris and Frans worked in Australia and Central and South America for Frans's year-long project on global biodiversity for National Geographic. That winter, Chris traveled on a Russian icebreaker to Antarctica where she spent six weeks visiting emperor penguin colonies along the coast of east Antarctica and seabird colonies on remote subantarctic islands. Her story about emperor penguins, "Time on Ice," appeared in Celebration of the Seas, a collection of essays published in 1998.
In early 2000, Chris and Frans undertook a series of National Geographic assignments that led them from the mountains of south India to the subantarctic isles off New Zealand, followed by aerial fieldwork in the Wrangell-St. Elias wilderness of Alaska. Recent National Geographic assignments have taken them to the volcanoes of Hawaii, the canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau, seabird islands in the North Pacific and the subantarctic, and to southeast Senegal, where they documented the first group of savanna chimpanzees to be studied by scientists. Chris’s stories on Zambia’s Luangwa Valley appeared in National Geographic Magazine and National Geographic Traveler in 2006. Her Traveler story, “The Last Real Africa,” won a 2007 Lowell Thomas Award for Best Magazine Article on Foreign Travel from the Society of American Travel Writers.
Chris is also a videographer and she documents the field assignments she produces with Frans Lanting as a video diary. She has filmed and produced pieces for the National Geographic Channel and NGM.com on cloud goats in India, elephants of the Western Ghats, Hawaii's volcanoes, wildlife in Zambia, albatrosses from the tropics to the Southern Ocean, and chimpanzees in West Africa. Her coverage of chimpanzees is also featured in the February 2008 NOVA-National Geographic special "Ape Genius."
Chris and Frans have recently started work on a project profiling California’s Monterey Bay.
Samples of Chris Eckstrom's work:
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