DIANE GAREY, FLORENTINE FILMS/HOTT PRODUCTIONS, INC.

Diane Garey has had a distinguished career as a documentary and feature editor and producer.  She edited and co-produced Wild By Law, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1992 and was broadcast as part of the American Experience series on PBS. In 1997 she edited Divided Highways, winner of an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Programming, a George Foster Peabody Award, and Best Documentary at the New England Film Festival. She received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995.

Her recent writing and editing credits include Ohio: 200 Years, a one-hour Ohio PBS special for the state’s bicentennial; Imagining Robert, a one-hour film for APT national broadcast on PBS and the recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Outstanding Documentary of 2002 designation; The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced, a two-hour film broadcast nationally on PBS in 2003; and Niagara Falls, which was broadcast nationally on PBS in July, 2006. 

LAWRENCE R. HOTT, FLORENTINE FILMS/HOTT PRODUCTIONS, INC.

Lawrence R. Hott has been producing documentary films since 1978, when he left the practice of law to join Florentine Films. His awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, a George Foster Peabody Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, 10 CINE Golden Eagles, screenings at Telluride, and first-place awards from the San Francisco, Chicago, National Educational, and New England Film Festivals.

Hott was the Fulbright Fellow in Film and Television in the United Kingdom in 1994. He received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995; a Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Fellowship in 2001; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2001. He has been on the board of non-fiction writers at Smith College and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 2002-2003 Hott completed three films for PBS broadcast, the one-hour Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival and the two-hour The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced and the one-hour OHIO:200 YEARS. He is currently producing and directing Through Deaf Eyes for WETA-TV, Washington, D.C. and John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature for American Masters, Thirteen/WNET, New York. He produced and directed Niagara Falls, which was broadcast nationally on PBS in July, 2006.

JOHN CHALMERS, M.D., F.R.C.S.

Dr. John Chalmers, the author of Audubon in Edinburgh and His Scottish Associates, is a retired orthopedic surgeon in Edinburgh, Scotland. After completing his medical education and training in Edinburgh, London, and Chicago--where he did research on the immunology of bone transplantation—-he spent most of his professional career in Edinburgh until his retirement in 1990. Chalmers has spent much his retirement researching Audubon's activities in Edinburgh and has enjoyed writing Audubon in Edinburgh, a book that has put him in touch with many kindred spirits.

He first became interested in Audubon in 1940, when as a schoolboy on a bird walk near Portland, Oregon, he saw the Audubon warbler (as it was then called) and the MacGillivray warbler on the same day. Chalmers was intrigued to discover that Audubon had spent nearly three years in Edinburgh during a series of visits between 1826-39. Audubon did his first engravings in Edinburgh and published his book Ornithological Biography with the assistance of leading Scottish natural historian William MacGillivray, Conservator of the Museum of The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

LESLIE KOSTRICH

Leslie Kostrich grew up in New York City's Washington Heights, near the site of John James Audubon's estate, Minniesland. As a child, she believed there were only two types of birds--pigeons and sparrows. But her views broadened after she discovered bird feeding. In 1998, she purchased a set of books that included reproductions of Audubon’s original bird paintings. Hooked on Audubon's art and fascinated by his life and relationship with his family, Kostrich became first a collector of and later a dealer in Audubon prints. She shares her passion for Audubon through her online gallery minniesland.com and as a moderator of an online discussion group on Audubon prints. 

RON TYLER, PH.D.

Ron Tyler is the Director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. He was a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-2006) and the former Director of the Texas State Historical Association and the Center for Studies in Texas History (1986-2005). He has written more than a dozen books including Audubon's Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of The Birds of America (1993), Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist as Explorer (1999), Prints of the West (1994), Views of Texas: The Watercolors of Sarah Ann Hardinge, 1852-1856 (1988), Visions of America: Pioneer Artists in a New Land (1983), and Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist on the Oregon Trail (1982), Posada’s Mexico (1979), The Rodeo of John Addison Stryker (1977), The Mexican War: A Lithographic Record (1975), The Cowboy (1975), The Big Bend: A History of the Last Texas Frontier (1975), The Slave Narratives of Texas (1974), and Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (1973).

Honors include the Capitan Alonzo de León medal for contributions to Mexican history from the Sociedad de Historia, Geografía, y Estadística de Nuevo León, Best Contribution to Knowledge from the Texas Institute of Letters and Best Book of the Year from the American Historical Print Collections Society for Prints of the West; Best Texas Book of the Year from the Texas State Historical Association (1976) for The Big Bend. 

TOM BLANTON

Tom Blanton is a CPA and an executive with JM Family Enterprises, Inc., the largest privately owned company in Florida. He is also a collector of 19th century natural history books, with a focus on John James Audubon (1785-1851) and Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), the father of American ornithology.

Blanton has been interested in birds and Audubon since he was a child and still has several well-worn Golden Nature Guides that he used to identify birds and other wildlife and plants that he saw in his backyard and along the canals in Florida. He was 10 years old when he  fell in love with a handsome octavo set of Audubon's Birds of America on display in a bookseller's window. One volume was open to a beautiful hand-colored plate. Try as he might, he couldn't convince his father, a Southern Baptist minister with a modest income, to buy them.

But his fascination with birds and Audubon continued to grow. He has built a collection that includes such rare items as the fascicles issued to the original subscribers of the octavo editions of Audubon’s The Birds of America and The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.

Blanton lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida, with his wife Jackie. Their daughter Kristen is working on her master's degree in environmental engineering at the University of Florida and son Eric is in the masters of accounting program at Florida International University.

BILL STEINER

Bill Steiner is a field ecologist and accomplished bird-watcher who, with his wife Peg, owns one of the most significant private collections of Audubon prints in the United States. He is the author of the book Audubon Art Prints: A collector's Guide to Every Edition, and he was the technical adviser and fact checker for the recent Audubon biography by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes.

An accomplished entomologist, herpetologist, and horticulturist, Steiner holds degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He recently retired from the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Atlanta where he served as a hazardous waste enforcement supervisor for 20 years. From 1994 to 1996, Steiner was loaned to the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games and was the environmental chief for the 1996 Summer Olympics. And in a far distant past life, he was a United States Army Drill Instructor. He and his wife now live in Asheville, North Carolina.

CHRISTOPH IRMSCHER, PH.D.

Christoph Irmscher is a professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has long been interested in American nature writing, is a noted authority on Audubon writings, and is the editor of John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings (Library of America, 1999), the first and only critical edition of Audubon's literary output. In addition, Irmscher was a consultant for, and appears in, the new documentary film featured at this conference, John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature. He is also a recipient of several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Houghton Library at Harvard, and the author of several other books, including The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James and Longfellow Redux, His current project is a new biography of Louis Agassiz. He is on the board of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal and is a member of the advisory board of NEW-CUE, a non-profit environmental education organization. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife, Lauren Bernofsky (a composer and violinist), six-year-old son Nicholas ("Nicky"), two-year-old daughter Julia, and two cats, Jeremy and Oliver.

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