Sivani Babu is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Compass. She is an award-winning journalist and nature photographer who has contributed to BBC Travel, AFAR, Backpacker, Outdoor Photographer, Narrative Magazine, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and numerous other publications. Her work as a writer and as an editor has been recognized in the Best American Travel Writing series multiple times and has appeared in exhibits from San Diego to the Sorbonne. To date, her stories and images have reached more than 100 million people. A lover of all things cold and dark, Sivani spends much of her travel life searching for beautiful ice and the darkest skies.

Sivani graduated from the University of Chicago with three majors — economics, public policy studies, and political science — and one Lazarused newspaper, the Chicago Weekly News. She served as a Teach for America corps member in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, where she taught eighth-graders about the tangency of math and literacy, and then attended the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. As a law student, she taught high schoolers about their constitutional rights and competed on Penn’s national trial team. After graduating from law school, she returned to Texas, where she worked on a Supreme Court case, joyfully included math equations in as many briefs as possible, and represented hundreds of indigent defendants as a federal public defender. Sivani ultimately left her career as a public defender to sail across the most brutal sea on earth and explore Antarctica. Since then, she has chased storms through Tornado Alley, hung out of helicopters over California wildfires, searched for polar bears in the Arctic Circle, and celestially navigating the Bermuda Triangle.

Sivani is working on her first book, about the role of journalism in protecting democracy in this dangerous moment.