CONNIE BRANSILVER

In Connie Bransilver's popular multi-media presentation on the Florida swamps, evocative music and images are merged and presented via seamless digital programming. Part

inspiration, part lecture, part poetry, this and similar programs have been presented to dozens of audiences throughout Florida. She has also presented at UCal Berkeley and camera clubs in Colorado as well as at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Connie Bransilver has been invited on many television and radio shows to discuss her passion for conservation of the natural world.

Connie has lectured on Madagascar, the Great Apes, and on Florida swamps, with appearances at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Lecture Series, at three different chapters of the Explorers Club, at two Audubon chapters, and at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. On the behalf of the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA), Connie presented slide shows at the GDT Festival in Lunen, Germany, and at Vargarda, Sweden.

"Eclectic" can best describe her background. Growing up in New Mexico, Connie showed Quarter Horses, barrel-raced, and also danced. After graduating from Duke University, she worked in the United States Congress.

She returned to New Mexico for law school, earned her Juris Doctor degree, and immediately thereafter moved to London where she practiced international law. She later joined Merrill Lynch International as a private banker covering Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Each year she was eligible, Connie won the coveted "Falcon" status award connoting top achievement. Upon returning to the United States, Connie continued with Merrill Lynch in Washington, D.C., but resigned in 1992 to devote full time to photography and then attend the Corcoran School of Art and the Smithsonian photography program.

Connie Bransilver was in the American Bar Association House of Delegates, one of only two women of 525 delegates. She secured passage of a resolution to reform the U.S. rape laws and testified on behalf of the ABA in Congress and in state legislatures. She appeared on numerous television and radio programs to discuss the issue. In London, Connie was one of the founders of the City (financial district) Women's Network and sat on the Board of the Women's Playhouse Trust during which time the organization mounted four West End productions.

Back in the United States, she was instrumental in setting up the Duke University Primate Center Board of Visitors and served as its first Chairperson. Connie is one of seven Base Camp Leaders for the Jane Goodall Institute, and she is active in the Balikpapan Orangutan Society and the African Wildlife Foundation. Based on her fieldwork with the Great Apes and with lemurs in Madagascar, Connie Bransilver was admitted as a Fellow (1996) in the Explorers Club. Her first major award was not for wildlife but for a photograph of a woman in Madagascar, which was the visual symbol for the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, (1995). She was the Explorers Club Grand Prize winner with her photograph of chinstrap penguins on an iceberg in 1997, and was the African Wildlife Foundation's Photographer of the Year for 1999.