This new, special partnership with National Geographic Live! will feature naturalists and filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert; photographer Maria Stenzel; cultural anthropologist Wade Davis; and underwater photographer David Doubilet. Following each presentation, speakers will answer audience questions and sign copies of their published works. The series also includes matinée presentations to bring students closer to these explorers as well as lesson plans and related materials for statewide educators. Here are more details about the programs, dates, and tickets.
National Geographic Live! Speaker Series
Naturalists and filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert
Relentless Enemies: Lions & Buffalo
Wednesday Oct. 10, 2007 at 7:30 p.m.
Award-winning filmmakers and naturalists Dereck and Beverly Joubert lead a life of adventure that most people can only imagine. For more than 25 years they have made the African wilderness their home, dedicating their lives to understanding and protecting its majestic creatures. Through their research, filmmaking, and writing, this amazing couple has brought new insights into the lives of lions, elephants, leopards, and other African animals that have long fired the human imagination. Romantic as their life in the bush may seem, it also includes more than its share of hardship and danger. In their presentation, Dereck and Beverly share highlights of the intense two years they spent living among a pride of threatened lions and a large buffalo herd in the Duba region of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Using award-winning images and video clips from their book and film, Relentless Enemies: Lions and Buffalo, the Jouberts reveal the remarkable survival dance being played out, showing dramatic first-ever footage of lions hunting in water. The Joubert’s have won four Emmys and a Peabody Award.
Photographer Maria Stenzel
The Deep South: Journey to Antarctica
Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007 at 7:30 p.m.
Over the past 15 years as a contributor to National Geographic Maria Stenzel has documented indigenous groups from the rainforest to the Arctic, dinosaur digs in Madagascar, and Inca mummies high in the Andes. Like most National Geographic photographers, however, she has found one region of the world that keeps calling her back. For Maria, the place closest to her heart is Antarctica: the frozen underworld of big seas, ice, and a surprisingly large concentration of wildlife. Maria’s work in Antarctica began in 1995 with a voyage by icebreaker. Four more projects have followed—the ice-free Dry Valleys; Sir Ernest Shackleton’s heroic journey across South Georgia Island; a survey of scientific research in Antarctica; and her latest National Geographic assignment, the South Sandwich Islands, for which she recently won a top National Magazine Award. A master of conveying the terrifying beauty and surprising variety of the Antarctic, Stenzel will share unforgettable land and seascapes, and offer a firsthand look at the wildlife, geologic history, explorers, and scientists of “The Deep South.”
Cultural Anthropologist Wade Davis
Light at the Edge of the World
Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.
Wade Davis is many things—author, scientist, adventurer, photographer, poet—but most importantly, he is a passionate defender of life’s diversity. Named by National Geographic as one of the “Explorers for the Millennium,” Davis is an anthropologist and plant explorer who has spent most of his life traveling the world, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the poetics of culture. His work as an ethnobotanist has brought him to the center of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the deserts of North Africa, the rain forests of Borneo and the Amazon, the southern Andes and the mountains of Tibet, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti, where he documented the zombie phenomenon in his bestselling book The Serpent and the Rainbow. Recently, Davis completed a four-part film series entitled Light at the Edge of the World, which began airing internationally on the National Geographic Channel this past spring. Shot in Polynesia, Peru, Nepal and the Arctic, the series follows Davis as he journeys into the heart of four traditional cultures, which have succeeded in withstanding the pressures of the modern world. In his inspiring and enlightening National Geographic Live! presentation, this champion of cultures will show excerpts from his Light series, and offer a passionate defense of what he calls “the poetry of diversity.”
Underwater Photographer David Doubilet
Secret Underwater Edens
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.
David Doubilet estimates that he has spent over half of his life underwater. At the age of 12, he took his first underwater photograph off the coast of his native New Jersey using a Brownie Hawkeye camera sealed in a plastic bag. He was hooked. Now considered the leading underwater photographer in the world, Doubilet has shot over 60 stories for National Geographic. His undersea reporting has taken him to the Red Sea, Pearl Harbor, the South Pacific, and beyond. Along the way he has captured groundbreaking images of great white sharks, sea lions, octopuses, penguins, fluorescent coral, World War II wrecks, and much more. Recently, Doubilet traveled into the heart of the Coral Triangle to the remote Indonesian waters of Raja Ampat and the Bird’s Head Seascape, known for having the world’s greatest concentration of marine biodiversity and the richest coral reefs. Join us for a magical evening as Doubilet takes us into these remote, delicate and sometimes dangerous underwater edens.
Where: Mesa Arts Center
When: October 10, 2007; November 7, 2007; January 9, 2008; February 13, 2008
How Much: Tickets for the four part series range from $94 to $138 per person (on sale now). Single ticket prices range from $26 to $38 (on sale August 13, 2007)
Explorers Circle: Explorers Circleseries tickets are $330. Explorers Circle ticket purchases include prime seating for the National Geographic Live! presentations; a private reception with speakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert; a signed copy of their new National Geographic book Relentless Enemies: Lions and Buffalo; and acknowledgment of series support in each printed event program. There are a limited number of Explorers Circle tickets available; $125 of the Explorers Circle ticket price is tax deductible.
Discounts: National Geographic members, Mesa Arts Center members and Mesa Southwest Museum members will receive a discount on all levels of series tickets.
Teachers: Teachers can register by visiting online. Plum Creek is the national sponsor of National Geographic Live! student programs.
Where To Stay: Here is a selection of hotels in downtown Mesa.
Information contained herein was provided courtesy of the Mesa Arts Center.
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