Jon Bowermaster
Festival directors have contracted with Jon Bowermaster to be the keynote speaker at next summer's festival. Bowermaster has Iowa connections as a Drake University graduate and a past visitor to Okoboji.
Writer and filmmaker Jon Bowermaster's most recent documentary—SoLa: Louisiana Water Stories has been making the rounds of film festivals and conferences since the fall of 2010. Begun two years earlier and focused on the lives of Southern Louisianans whose lives depend on the sea, its filming concluded with the BP spill in the Gulf making it evermore relevant. His most recent book is Oceans: The Threats to the Sea and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide. An anthology of original essays by some of the world's most intriguing ocean thinkers and doers, the book is companion to the new Jacques Perrin/DisneyNature film Oceans, which both came out in the U.S. on Earth Day, April 22.
The latest films from Mr. Bowermaster and his team continue to garner praise. Terra Antarctica, documenting a six-week long exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula by sail and sea kayak won "Best Ocean Issues" award from the Blue Ocean Film Festival; What Would Darwin Think?: Man v. Nature in the Galapagos was awarded "Best Environmental Film" at the Vancouver International Film Festival. A six-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council, his 2007-2008 Antarctic expedition was the final in his OCEANS 8 project, which over the past decade has taken him and his teams around the world by sea kayak, including expeditions to the Aleutian Islands, Vietnam, French Polynesia, Chile/Argentina/Bolivia, Gabon, Croatia and Tasmania. Seeing the world from the seat of a sea kayak over the past decade has given Bowermaster a one-of-a-kind look at both the health of the world's oceans and the lives of the nearly 3 billion people around the globe who depend on them.
Mr. Bowermaster’s reporting on the relationship between man and the sea continues with his blog—“Notes from Sea Level"—giving him a daily forum for continuing the conversation with a growing audience.
John Bowermaster is author of eleven books and producer of a dozen documentary films. When not on the sea, Jon Bowermaster lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.