Lavinia Currier

Lavinia Currier is a filmmaker, philanthropist, poet, and environmental activist.

Growing up in New York City, she attended the first Earth Day, went on to study theater and direct liturgical plays where she inaugurated the Saint Francis Day Celebration of the Animals with a pageant of biodiversity inside the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. She then went to Nepal with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) to study tigers in the Terai.

She founded the Sacharuna Foundation in the 1980’s to support Indigenous Peoples and conservation of diverse ecosystems around the world, including the Pacific Ocean, Central Africa, and the Tibetan Plateau.

Her feature films, Passion in the Desert, and Oka! explore the relationship between humans and the natural world. She was executive producer of the documentary Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle for Freedom (2010), directed Deep Trouble, (2023) on deep sea mining with Sylvia Earle and Yo-Yo Ma, and is currently developing her next film. She wrote a children’s book, ‘No More Plastic in the Ocean’. She has volunteered on a Sea Shepherd vessel in the South Pacific, at Ibera National Park in Argentina, served on the boards of World Wildlife Fund, The Bridge Fund, Putney School and Chama Peak Land Alliance. Her support of Tibetan refugees earned the International Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth Award presented by the Dalai Lama.

On family land in the Southern San Juan mountains, Currier is currently working with the State of Colorado to restore keystone species such as the wolf, the wolverine, and the bison, as well as river otter and endemic cutthroat trout. On Molokai where she lives, she works with her family and the island community on coastal conservation with reforestation of native species, restoration of habitat for threatened seabirds, and reduction of ocean plastics.