Our Team
Katie Carpenter
PRODUCER
Katie Carpenter is an award-winning filmmaker specializing in environmental subjects for public and cable television. Most recently, she produced for “Ocean Warriors”, a six-hour series filmed around the world for Animal Planet and executive produced by Robert Redford and Paul Allen. Previously, she produced two National Geographic specials for PBS, “Bones of Turkana” and “Battle for the Elephants”, filmed on location in Kenya, Tanzania and China, and a subsequent production, “Warlords of Ivory”, on the illegal ivory trade for National Geographic Channel. Her films have aired on PBS, Discovery Channel, MSNBC, Fox, ABC and Disney Channel, and have been shot across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the US.
As a partner in Everwild Media, Carpenter produced “Hundred Heartbeats”, a two-hour special on the most endangered species around the world for MSNBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary feature film “A Year On Earth” for Discovery and Discovery Kids. Her enthusiasm for wildlife conservation programming was nurtured as Vice President of Film/TV for National Audubon Productions, where she developed and produced wildlife series, prime-time specials and educational videos on birds and wildlife at risk, in co-production with Animal Planet, Turner Broadcasting, PBS, Disney Channel and the BBC.
The Yale Cultural Cognition Project recruited Carpenter to be a Project Director and Media Consultant for their Science Communication Initiative. In that role, she works with a team of experts in psychology, communications and policy-relevant science to study media coverage of polarizing issues, from climate change to vaccines, nuclear power to gun control. She produces videos for qualitative testing to help scientists understand how climate science information lands inconsistently across diverse cultural audiences, and recommends strategies to avoid the polarization that plagues policymaking in this arena.
Carpenter taught documentary filmmaking at Princeton University, including a one-semester Global Seminar on Wildlife Filmmaking at Princeton’s campus at Mpala, Kenya. She is a Boardmember of Wildlife Direct, Co-Chair of the Producers Guild of America’s Green Committee, Vice Chair of Audubon’s Women in Conservation Committee, and a member of the Writers Guild of America.