JIMMY
CHIN

DIRECTOR + AUTHOR + PHOTOGRAPHER

The Risk of Not Risking Enough

Wednesday, July 31
9:30 – 10:30am

There are two great risks in life — risking too much or risking too little. As a pro climber, skier, National Geographic photographer and Academy Award-winning film director, Jimmy will take us on a journey of following your heart and taking risks to achieve greatness. He will explore the tenets of commit and figure it out, and the courage to be vulnerable required to take risks, and to discover and follow where the path of risk takes us.

Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, New York Times Bestselling author, and National Geographic photographer. He has been an active professional climber and skier on The North Face Athlete team for over 20 years, and led cutting-edge climbing and mountaineering expeditions around the world. As a photographer, his work has been featured in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Outside Magazine and others, winning numerous awards including National Geographic’s prestigious Photographers’ Photographer Award. His first book of photography, “There and Back,” became a New York Times Best Seller in 2021.

Along with his wife and co-director, Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy produced and directed “Free Solo,” an intimate, unflinching portrait of rock climber Alex Honnold which won seven Primetime 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 made 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 millions of acres in Chile and Argentina.

Other projects include their Emmy winning and Oscar shortlisted documentary “The Rescue,” chronicling the against-all-odds rescue of twelve 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 the National Geographic series “Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin.” 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.