Endurance

Dr. John Shears is a British polar geographer and expedition leader. Dr. Shears has a first-class degree and Ph.D. in geography from the University of Southampton. After successfully completing his academic studies, Dr. Shears began his career in polar research and exploration in 1990. He has well over 30 years of experience working in both Antarctica and the Arctic, first with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), then the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and now running his own polar consultancy business, Shears Polar Limited. Since 2017, Dr. Shears’ polar expeditions have focused on the search for Shackleton’s ship Endurance in Antarctica, although he first advised on the possibility of a search mission for the lost ship in 2005 while at BAS. In 2019, he was the expedition leader for the Weddell Sea expedition. Then, in 2022, he was the expedition leader of Endurance22, which made the historic discovery of Endurance on March 5, 2022, at a depth of 3,000 meters under the ice. Dr. Shears is the co-author with Nico Vincent of the National Geographic book “Endurance: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Legendary Ship,” described by National Geographic as a companion to the documentary movie. Dr. Shears is a long-standing fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a former vice president of the Society, and a chartered geographer. He is a fellow of The Explorers Club and a recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Explorers Club Visionary Award in 2024. Dr. Shears was awarded the Polar Medal by Her Majesty the Queen in 2019 in recognition of his “outstanding achievement and service to the United Kingdom in the field of polar research.” In 2023, Dr. Shears became a visiting professor in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton. He lives near Cambridge in the U.K.

Nico Vincent is a subsea engineer, surveyor and underwater vehicle manager with more than 30 years of experience on deep-sea projects, including the discovery and survey of many significant shipwrecks. He started his career in France at COMEX with its legendary chairman Henri Delauze (the French equivalent of Capt. Don Walsh, the conqueror of the Challenger Deep). Today, Vincent is recognized as the “special project maker” for deep-sea missions around the world. He’s also a subsea consultant for the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la sécurité de l'aviation civile (BEA, the French equivalent of the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority). He and his team hold four world records, including the recovery of the world’s deepest cargo of silver coins from the wreck of SS City of Cairo on behalf of the U.K. government; they supported the location of the fighter plane of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and, they worked with explorer Victor Vescovo to discover the world’s deepest wreck: the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a World War II destroyer escort found 22,621 feet (6,895 meters) deep in the Philippine Sea. They have also located the missing naval submarines AJA San Juan and La Minerve and helped investigate significant air accidents, including Air France AF447 in 2009, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in 2014 and EgyptAir Flight MS804 in 2022. Vincent was the point of contact ashore for the Weddell Sea expedition in 2019 regarding subsea operation. Following the failure of this first expedition, he worked for over three years to plan the search and discovery of Endurance. He created unique procedures for subsea operations, chose new, never-before-used technology and developed all operations plans for the project. Vincent co-authored with Dr. John Shears the National Geographic book “Endurance: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Legendary Ship,” scheduled for worldwide publication on Nov. 5, 2024. Vincent is a member of the Society of Underwater Technology, la Société des Explorateur Français, and The Explorer Club, who awarded their prestigious Citation of Merit in 2024 on behalf of the Endurance22 team for the discovery of Endurance. Vincent is now the operations manager of Deep Ocean Search Ltd. and lives in Marseille, France.

A fifth-generation Falkland Islander, Mensun Bound studied in the United States, where he was a research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before moving to Oxford University on scholarship in 1978. While a research fellow at St Catherine’s College in the 1980s, he founded the first academic unit for maritime archaeology in England. Later, he was appointed the Triton Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at St Peter’s College. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Explorer’s Club. Known as the “Indiana Jones of the Deep,” Bound has conducted wreck surveys and excavations all over the world in a career that spanned more than 40 years. In 1981, he excavated one of the oldest known shipwrecks (an Etruscan ship from 600 BC), and in 1997, he used saturation diving methods in the South China Sea off Vietnam to carry out the deepest hands-on shipwreck excavation there has ever been. In 2019, Bound stunned the world with his discovery of Admiral von Spee’s flagship, Scharnhorst, which had been lost in battle during World War I. In addition, Bound has raised a number of exceptional individual artifacts such as the statuette of a rising dragon now in the British Museum, a gun from the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in the River Plate and from Lord Nelson’s favorite ship, HMS Agamemnon, the only cannon that is proven to have been fired at the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain’s greatest victory at sea. Twelve museums around the globe hold permanent displays of material excavated by Bound. In August 2012, Bound was at a meeting in a London coffee shop when the project to find Shackleton’s Endurance was conceived. In 2019, he became the director of exploration on the first search to find the “unreachable” ship beneath the ice, which ended in failure when their Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) disappeared without a trace. In 2022, the search resumed with Bound in the same role, this time under the auspices of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, of which Bound is a trustee. On March 5, the Endurance was found at a depth of 3000 meters under the ice, and as predicted by Bound, it was upright, largely intact, proud of the seabed and in an excellent state of preservation. His journey to find the Endurance is chronicled in his bestseller “The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance” (Ed. Macmillan, 2022). His next book, “Wonders in the Deep” (with Mark Frary, Ed. Simon and Schuster, September 2024), is about maritime archaeology, beginning with the watercraft of the ancient Egyptians and ending with the Endurance.

Dan Snow is a BAFTA-winning history broadcaster and bestselling author. He hosted dozens of history documentaries for the BBC, Discovery, The History Channel and others before founding the multiple award-winning digital history platform History Hit in 2015. He has visited hundreds of historical sites, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from Hawaii to the Himalayas. He was the onboard historian on the successful expedition to find the wreck of Shackleton’s ship Endurance in 2022. He lives in a house that was used as a World War II special forces training facility with his wife and three kids.

Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are Academy Award®-winning filmmakers and the directors and producers of “Free Solo,” the intimate and unflinching portrait of rock climber Alex Honnold that won seven Emmys, a BAFTA and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. Their first film together, “Meru,” won the Audience Award at Sundance in 2015 and was on the 2016 Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature. More recently, they directed and produced “Wild Life,” A sweeping portrait of conservationists Kris and Doug Tompkins chronicling their fight to preserve wild land in Chile and Argentina. Other projects include National Geographic’s DGA-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary “The Rescue,” chronicling the against-all-odds rescue of 12 boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand; “Return to Space,” about SpaceX and NASA’s first joint spaceflight, which hit the top 10 on Netflix’s most-watched films list; and two series for National Geographic: “Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin” and “Photographer.” Their first scripted feature, “Nyad,” about Diana Nyad’s 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida, began streaming on Netflix in the fall of 2023 and garnered Academy Award, Golden Globe, and SAG nominations for both stars Jodie Foster and Annette Bening.

Natalie Hewit is an award-winning director and producer who has been making primetime documentaries and series for major terrestrial and international broadcasters for over a decade. Her work has received widespread industry recognition and critical acclaim, including nominations for a BAFTA and a Royal Television Society Award for Channel 4’s “Surviving Covid,” a feature documentary filmed over two months inside an ICU ward during the first wave of the COVID 19 pandemic in London. She also received Grierson and Broadcast Award nominations for the BBC’s drama-doc “The Drug Trial: Emergency at the Hospital.” With human narratives at their core, her projects have taken her to numerous remote and highly challenging locations. In 2016, she spent three months filming “Antarctica: Ice Station Rescue” at the Halley VI Research Station for the BBC’s prestigious “Horizon” science series, which was nominated for Best Documentary at the Broadcast Awards. Her work has also led her to collaborate with various high-profile talent, including Greta Thunberg and Louis Theroux. ENDURANCE marks her second National Geographic feature and second visit to Antarctica, where she documented the expedition to find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s infamous ship in the toughest conditions on the planet. Hewit is known for her passion for narratives that explore what it means to be human, resulting in her work being deemed “Five Stars ‒ Essential” by the Financial Times and “haunting and powerful” by The Guardian.

Ruth Johnston is an award-winning producer and executive producer of films ranging from Oscar winner “Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” and Oscar nominees “Hunger Ward” and “Lead Me Home” to festival favorites “Reason I Jump” and “Master of Light.” She’s a veteran producer behind hundreds of hours of film, television and interactive digital media projects, including the multiple Emmy-winning “Cash Cab.” As an executive, she was COO of Lion TV in New York and, most recently, general manager of Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions, where she grew and managed a team that became an industry leader in impact storytelling. Today, she’s one of two co-founders of Consequential, a production and consultancy company operating at the intersection of storytelling and social change. Johnston is currently producing ENDURANCE for National Geographic Documentary Films and overseeing production for Consequential’s other documentary films while developing several projects across the spectrum of the world’s most pressing issues. Consultancy clients include philanthropists, storytellers and platforms optimizing strategies for development, production, distribution, and audience acquisition and activation. An avid traveler, certified rescue diver and sailor who is originally from Northern Ireland, Johnston lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.

Bob Eisenhardt is a filmmaker renowned for editing documentaries and a frequent Little Monster Films collaborator. He is an Oscar nominee, a five-time Emmy winner, and a two-time winner of the Eddie Award from the American Cinema Editors. He has over 60 films to his credit. Eisenhardt edited “Free Solo,” the 2019 Academy and BAFTA Award winner, for which he received the ACE Eddie for Best Editing – Documentary. He produced and edited the 2021 BAFTA-nominated and Emmy-winning “The Rescue” and “Wild Life,” which premiered at SXSW. His film “Spaces: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph” was an Academy Award nominee for Best Short Documentary. His other films include “Everything Is Copy: Nora Ephron”; “Scripted and Unscripted,” which was the winner of ACE Eddie for Best Editing – TV Documentary; “Wagner’s Dream,” for which he received an Emmy nomination for Editing; “Meru,” a Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner; “Valentino: The Last Emperor”; and “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing.” When not in the editing room, Eisenhardt teaches the thesis master class at both the School of Visual Arts MFA Program and the New York Film Academy.

Carolyn Bernstein is executive vice president of Documentary Films at National Geographic, where she oversees the award-winning National Geographic Documentary Films (NGDF) banner. Over the last six years, Bernstein has built NGDF into an industry powerhouse, partnering with best-in-class filmmakers to tell gripping, creatively ambitious stories that inspire a deeper connection to our world. Under her leadership, NGDF has earned both awards recognition and commercial success, starting with E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Oscar, BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning “Free Solo.” Other notable titles include Oscar-nominated “The Cave,” “Fire of Love” and “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” and BAFTA-nominated “The Rescue.” Upcoming NGDF projects include Sundance Directing Award winner “Sugarcane,” along with Oscar winner Daniel Roher’s “BLINK” (with co-director Edmund Stenson). Bernstein has also been a scripted television executive for over 30 years, having developed and overseen culture-defining series “Dawson’s Creek,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Smallville,” “One Tree Hill,” FX’s “The Bridge” and Nat Geo’s award-winning “Genius” franchise. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University and resides in Los Angeles with her family.

Paul Woolf has 25 years of experience developing and making documentaries and factual TV series in the U.S. and U.K. He was an executive producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary “Growing Up Down’s” (directed by Will Jessop) and the DOC NYC selection “Road To Roxham” (directed by Cristian Gomes). Woolf co-created the BAFTA-winning BBC family series “Operation Ouch” and has developed series and specials for, among others, Netflix, Discovery, ITV, Animal Planet, Sky, Oxygen and Channel 4. Woolf runs Little Dot Studios’ premium documentary channel Real Stories, which has more than 12.5 million followers across YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, as well as a number of the company’s other digital brands. He has a doctorate in American literature and history.

Ted Richane is a seasoned campaigner, producer and entrepreneur working closely with filmmakers, production companies, funders and distributors from development through distribution to ensure storytelling makes a measurable impact. A co-founder of Consequential, a production and consultancy company operating at the intersection of storytelling and social change, he is an industry leader in building and managing story-driven impact campaigns. He has a proven record of leveraging film to build audiences, change public policy and shift the trajectories of some of society’s most pressing challenges. At Consequential, Richane is currently executive producing multiple feature-length documentaries, developing several others and leveraging his experience advising philanthropists, storytellers and platforms on how to optimize story-driven impact strategies. For six years, Richane oversaw publicity, audience engagement and impact strategy for Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions, where he was responsible for maximizing reach and social change for projects spanning ocean health, conservation, climate change and beyond. He combines his 15 years in unscripted entertainment with nearly a decade of experience in Washington, D.C., working in communications for numerous political and advocacy campaigns and serving clients ranging from nonprofit organizations and filmmakers to Fortune 500 companies and foreign and local governments. Richane has a master’s in Public Diplomacy from the University of Southern California and an undergraduate degree from Syracuse University. He’s a founding board member of the Impact Guild, a backpacker and youth soccer coach and a referee who calls Los Angeles home.

Anna Barnes is an Emmy-winning producer who runs all aspects of Little Monster Films (LMF), developing content and overseeing the production of films and series from inception to release. Having first worked with Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin on their 2015 hit “Meru,” she reteamed with them and National Geographic on the record-breaking theatrical release of the Oscar®-winning film “Free Solo.” She won an Emmy as part of the producing team on “The Rescue” and has produced or executive produced the series “Photographer” and “Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin” and the films “Wild Life,” “Return to Space,” “14 Peaks” and the upcoming ENDURANCE. Prior to LMF, she worked on many of the top nonfiction films of the past decade, including a long roster of Oscar winners and nominees such as Ezra Edelman’s “OJ: Made in America,” Matthew Heineman’s “Cartel Land,” Bryan Fogel’s “Icarus,” Yance Ford’s “Strong Island,” RaMell Ross’ “Hale County: This Morning, This Evening” and Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea.” As an executive at Cinetic Media, she oversaw the distribution campaigns for many successful documentaries, such as the Oscar-nominated Banksy documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and Asif Kapadia’s “Senna.” Barnes started her career in Boston working with legendary filmmaker and Oscar-winner Frederick Wiseman.

Dan Jones is an International Emmy and quadruple BAFTA-winning executive producer and the CEO of Little Dot Studios, the pioneering content studio and digital media network. Jones has worked at the forefront of the convergence of TV and social platforms for more than two decades, leading numerous world-first productions and collecting seven Royal Television Society Awards and seven Broadcast Digital Awards.

Bill Locke is head of Programming at History Hit, overseeing all the film output of this digital broadcaster and production company. In this role, he has made films on everything from prehistoric archaeology to the Inca and Anne Boleyn, winning the coveted best Specialist Channel at the Broadcast Digital Awards in 2023. Locke was in charge of History Hit’s coverage of the Endurance22 expedition throughout the voyage, remotely guiding editorial output in Antarctica. Prior to History Hit, Locke was head of Specialist Factual at Lion Television, a major international production company. During his 20 years at Lion, he won Emmys, UNESCO and One World Awards, as well as gaining BAFTA nominations.

Donald Lamont was born on 13 January 1947 in Aberdeen, Scotland. He attended Aberdeen Grammar School and graduated from Aberdeen University with a First Class Honors Degree (MA in Russian Studies). The University later awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws (DLL). Donald spent four years in the British motor industry and in 1974 joined Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service. His first job was as desk officer dealing with deep sea mining, then the subject of negotiations at the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. Donald was then posted to Vienna, dealing principally with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Industrial Development Organisation. From 1980-82 Donald was First Secretary (Commercial and Scientific) at the British Embassy, Moscow, where he met his wife, Lynda, a Geography graduate of Glasgow University who was also working at the Embassy. On return to London, Donald served for three years on the Argentine Desk at the Foreign Office, followed by three years on the Economic and Social side of the United Nations, including counter-narcotics policy and addressing the new challenges of HIV-AIDS. After a spell at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Donald was posted in 1988 as Political Adviser to the British Commandant in Berlin. That involved responding to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and movement towards German Unification. The Foreign Office then posted Donald as British Ambassador to Uruguay. He and Lynda spent three years in Montevideo with Louise (b. 1986) and Ian (b. 1988) before returning to London in 1994 to head the Foreign Office Department dealing with relations with Ireland. There followed a secondment in Sarajevo as Chief of Staff to the High Representative, a post created by the Dayton Accords that ended the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. From Bosnia Donald and Lynda headed to the Falkland Islands, where Donald served as Governor and as Commissioner for South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Donald’s final posting was as Ambassador to Venezuela (2003-2006). On retiring from the Diplomatic Service Donald was first contracted as Chief Executive of Wilson Park, a conference center managed by the UK Foreign Office. Subsequently Donald was involved with a number of charities that reflected his involvement with South America and the Falkland Islands, including Sistema Scotland, a Venezuelan-inspired charity aimed at transforming children’s lives through the orchestra. He was a founding Trustee and Chairman of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, established in 2014, that organized and funded the Endurance22 Expedition that located, surveyed and filmed the wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance.