THE TEAM

Matt Aeberhard

Director & Cinematographer

BirdStory co-founder Matt Aeberhard is one of the world’s leading wildlife filmmakers—an Emmy-winning cinematographer with more than three decades of experience in the world’s wildest places, beginning on the Serengeti as a protégé of Hugo Van Lawick, to work for the BBC’s Our Planet and Perfect Planet series, Dancing with the Birds for Netflix, and The Crimson Wing for Disney. His work behind the lens renders the natural world with unforgettable artistry and nuance. Sir David Attenborough described Matt’s work as “awe-inspiring".

Melanie Finn

Writer & Producer

BirdStory co-founder Melanie Finn is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. She is also the co-founder and director of a small healthcare charity in Lake Natron, Tanzania, that brings sustainable healthcare to marginalized Maasai communities. As the writer and producer of the Stories to Save Us series, she is particularly interested in unpacking how we mythologize landscapes and how this impacts the ways we exploit and restore them.

FAVORITE BIRD:  the house sparrow.

Andy Johnson

Producer

BirdStory partner Andy Johnson is a seasoned field ornithologist, award-winning documentary filmmaker, and conservation policy strategist, currently working for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Conservation Media. His work has spanned academic research, uncovering the migratory pathways and stopover ecology of arctic-breeding shorebirds; and strategic conservation storytelling from India and China, through the New World tropics and coastal United States, to remote stretches of the Bering Sea and Canadian subarctic.

Harri Bailey

Field Producer

Harri Bailey is a Producer/Director with over a decade of experience working in science and natural history documentaries for the BBC, National Geographic, PBS and Netflix. She has led crews across frozen lakes in the Arctic and through peat swamps in Borneo. She co-founded the Feminist Bird Club’s Jersey City chapter in 2021 with a mission to promote diversity, inclusion and access to the natural world and connect people to their neighborhood’s wild spaces.

FAVORITE BIRD: the painted bunting.

Mike Downey

Executive Producer

With more than 40 years in fimmaking, Executive Producer Mike Downey has worked with writers like James Ellroy, Gunter Grass and Colm Toibin, and directors including Agnieszka Holland and Peter Greenaway. As Chairman of the European Film Academy he is the co- founder of the International Coalition for Film Makers at Risk and for a decade was a Trustee of the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2021, he was he was awarded an O.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to British Cinema.