Ian Cheney

Categories

Video Journalism

Sustainability

speaker

Food Issues

Film

environmentalism

Environment

Documentary

Architecture

Agriculture/Farming

 
Ian Cheney grew up in New England playing in the woods and rooting for the Boston Red Sox. He attended The Mountain School, a semester-program on a 300-acre farm in Vermont, and then enrolled at Yale College concentrating in Ethics, Politics, & Economics. When he realized how much he missed Maine’s starry skies and blueberry fields, he grew dedicated to exploring the human relationship to the natural world—and trying to salvage what’s left of it. 

At Yale, Ian split his extra time between an improvisational comedy troupe and the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, where he focused his efforts on greening the Yale campus; he could frequently be seen riding through campus atop a blue recycling dumpster, or releasing sheep onto the central quad with longtime friend & collaborator Curt Ellis. Ian was a founder of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, a project dedicated to bringing locally grown foods to campus. He earned a fellowship to study food markets in West Africa, and was awarded the Berkeley Master’s Prize for his efforts to make Yale green. Ian graduated with distinction from Yale College in 2002, and subsequently earned a Master’s degree at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2003.

After graduate school, Ian directed the short-film TWO BUCKETS (2006), about a loner in the woods of Maine, and starred in the feature documentary KING CORN (2007) with director Aaron Woolf and co-producer Curt Ellis. A yearlong romp following corn’s transformation into fast-food, the film is hailed by the Boston Globe as “enormously entertaining…a moral, socio-economic odyssey through the American food system.” Shared with theatergoers in 60 cities and in a PBS national broadcast, KING CORN asks us to rethink how we farm—and what we eat.

Ian then directed THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE (2008), a feature documentary that follows Boston’s first residential “green” building” through the eyes of the skeptical union crews who are asked to install a sloping green roof, cotton insulation, and wheatboard cabinets—and fix it all when things start to go awry. Earning an Earth Day broadcast on The Sundance Channel and awards at film festivals worldwide, THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE is a humorous, in-the-trenches story about the new green collar economy and the future of the way we live.

Ian’s goal is to create media that reconnects us to the sources of our everyday things – our food, buildings, energy and water – while advocating a closer relationship to the natural world. Currently at work on a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearance of dark night from the earth (THE CITY DARK), Ian is also the outreach producer for Kaiulani Lee’s film about pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, A SENSE OF WONDER, and was a contributing cinematographer on the award-winning lyme disease documentary UNDER OUR SKIN. He founded Wicked Delicate Films (named after the compliment paid to a top-notch blueberry pie) with Curt Ellis in 2005.

Living in Brooklyn, NY Ian splits his time between writing, filmmaking, and public speaking. Since college, he has delivered speeches and guided discussions at dozens of colleges, high schools, and conferences across the country, harnessing his background as an improv comedian and environmental activist; Ian sees humor, optimism, and empathy as key ingredients in transforming the way we eat, build, live and work. He also speaks frequently alongside his Wicked Delicate collaborator, Curt Ellis, and offers Q&A sessions for their films.  Ian is an avid astrophotographer and runner, a contributing blogger for The Huffington Post, a video Op-Ed contributor for The New York Times, and has appeared on CNN, CNN-International, NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook, Good Morning America, BoingBoing, and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Men’s Journal. His and Curt’s latest harebrained idea is transforming Ian’s old pickup truck into a mobile greenhouse using scrap-metal found on the streets of Brooklyn.


Ian Cheney's featured lecture is  Our House in Space.

The “environment” is just another word for our home in outer space. Growing up in America today, it’s easy to take our home for granted: water pours from the tap, energy flows from the sockets, and calories cost pennies at the corner store. With more and more of us living in cities, fewer and fewer of us understand where our “things” come from, and this disconnect lies at the heart of our problematic relationship with the natural world. When we cannot see the farms that supply our food, the forests that build our cities, or the stars above our heads, the natural world becomes more an idea than a reality.

In a lively, humorous, multimedia presentation, Ian Cheney leads audiences behind the scenes of the feature films KING CORN and THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE, showing how the more we know about the sources of our sustenance, the better prepared we are as consumers, voters, and citizens. Emphasizing the importance of everyday choices, Ian asserts that reconnecting to the natural world is a necessary prerequisite for environmental sustainability. And whether it’s growing food in the back of your pickup truck or just reading a soda label more closely, there are myriad ways forward that enrich our lives, power our economy, and rebuild our house in space.

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For booking availability and press inquiries:
Please contact Ian Cheney's speaker agents at the Evil Twin Booking Agency.

email: Liz Cole and Scott Beibin [ info (at) eviltwinbooking (dot) com ]
+1.215.473.0308 | eviltwinbooking.com

Evil Twin Booking Agency p.o. box 30726 philadelphia pa 19104 usa

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