Speakers
Stay Tuned for More Exciting Speaker Announcements in early 2023!
Alister Benn
keynote speaker
Alister Benn is a Scottish artist, writer, musician and educator. He runs his company Expressive Photography with his Norwegian wife, Ann Kristin Lindaas. Alister's approach to expressive creativity is one closely tied to personal development and sustaining positive mental health. His new book Out of Darkness explores the relationship between the landscape and the aesthetics of emotional engagement. This fusion of inner and outer landscapes is a gateway to our subconscious and self-acceptance.
Alister’s ebooks, Luminosity and Contrast, The Colour of Meaning and Creativity Superpowers offer game-changing approaches on how we look at landscape photography and his YouTube Channel offers thoughtful explorations on creativity and our ability to curate emotional resonance through our photos, as well as interviews with some of the biggest names in nature photography today. We’re honoured to have Alister as our Keynote Speaker for this year’s event.
Rebecca Simrose
Rebecca Simrose is a landscape photographer with a fierce dedication to exploring wild places. Photography is her passion and obsession. Two years ago, she left her 30-year career in medicine to pursue photography full time and hasn’t looked back. She’s spent weeks in the Summers camped in a tent or bivy high in the remote mountains, she’s hiked many kilometers with a backpack half her weight, ventured to glaciers and frozen lakes in Winter, and near froze in the predawn on mountaintops - and never has she felt more like this is where she belongs. This is where she feels most alive.
Rebecca’s stunning photography takes people to places few will ever venture to themselves. She hopes her photography will inspire people to connect with this beautiful planet and love and protect it. She hopes she can inspire people to get out to the wild places, because she believes that they will find there the peace and happiness that she has found.
Alan Dyer
Alan Dyer is a night sky photographer and author of astronomy books. Alan is a veteran of 16 total solar eclipses, having seen the Moon cover the Sun from the ends of the Earth, from both the Arctic and Antarctic, and from the air and at sea. He is co-author of the popular guidebook for amateur astronomers, The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, published by Firefly Books. From 1993 to 2013 Alan produced astronomy programs for the science centres in Calgary. He is a frequent contributor to both SkyNews and Sky & Telescope magazines. Asteroid 78434 is named for him.
dara Ojo
Dara Ojo is a macro photographer who takes incredible, well-detailed pictures of tiny creatures.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1990, Dara grew up playing with his dad’s broken Nikon camera but didn’t discover his passion for photography until he was an undergraduate student at Covenant University in the UK. While studying, he’d use his point-and-shoot to take photos of his classmates and landmark areas inside the campus. He moved to China after getting his master’s degree in information technology in 2018 and as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in late 2019, he found the boredom of lockdown unbearable so on a rainy day in January 2020, he ordered a Nikon D3500 - his first DSLR camera. He opted to photograph birds but due to the restrictions in place he couldn’t move around to shoot as much as he wanted to. A photographer friend suggested he try macro photography because, in his words, “bugs are everywhere”. Over the past two years, Dara has built an impressive portfolio of wonderful insect portraits, published a book, and has twice been featured on the United Nations Biodiversity Instagram page for week-long takeovers.
Anna Morgan
Anna Morgan is a nature photographer and writer currently residing with her family of four in British Columbia, Canada. After practicing veterinary medicine for about 12 years, she enrolled in a postgraduate masters program in the transdisciplinary field of Conservation Medicine. Her research brought photography and conservation together to examine the role of the conservation photographer, and opened the door for her to explore her self-awareness and brought her a deeper understanding of the structural frameworks that underpin the premise of conservation photography. With a focus on intimate landscapes and an emphasis on connecting to place from an introspective perspective, Anna aims to create expressive images that capture the quiet, mysterious beauty she finds in nature.
Abbie Reilander
Abbie Reilander is an 18 year old, award-winning wildlife and nature photographer based in the vast, intriguing, ever changing prairies of Saskatchewan. She has been taking photos for just over three years, focusing primarily on wildlife for the past two. Abbie is also an avid writer and travel fanatic; she applies both through her unique photographs, conveyed in ways never done before to truly encase the beauty of Canada through her own life experiences.
Abbie recently graduated from a small, secondary school in the city of Saskatoon, SK. She is planning on attending the Okanagan campus of UBC for Environmental Evolutionary Conservational Biology (or EECB), in hopes of becoming a wildlife biologist as her love of photography led to her undying love of wildlife. Through her crafted photos and careful expressions, Abbie hopes to spread awareness of the delicate conservation world to better both the animals and the environment as well as the larger world itself.
Each and every speaker were absolutely amazing! When working on composition I now have a plethora of voices in my head giving me inspiration! The whole conference was a positive experience.Bea Kachmarchyk
GET YOUR TICKET
Stay Tuned for More Exciting Speaker Announcements in early 2023!