Holly Morris

Holly Morris is an award-winning filmmaker and writer, and television host. Her newest documentary, The Babushkas of Chernobyl, premiered at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival where she won the Jury Award for Directing. Lauded by reviewers, the film - about a defiant community of women who live inside Ukraine’s radioactive “Exclusion Zone”- is based on her award-winning and widely syndicated essay “The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” (also published as “Ukraine: A Country of Women) and her popular TED Talk.

Through her work on The Babushkas of Chernobyl, she has lectured widely, and appeared on numerous television programs to talk about post-nuclear disaster zones, relocation trauma, the palliative powers of home and self-determination - and the spirited, unlikely heroines of Chernobyl’s “Dead Zone,” and their fierce ties to ‘motherland.’

She has written and directed several other documentaries that explore the lives of courageous women – politicos, activists and artists making change in their home cultures. These documentaries include: Behind Closed Chadors (Iran), Holy Cow (India), Mana Wahines (New Zealand) and Paradox Found (Cuba). These documentaries were broadcast nationally on PBS and in more than 20 countries worldwide as part of the Adventure Divas series.

She is the author of Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine (Random House), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and contributes to many national publications, including O, The New York Times, and MORE. Her recent story about a subculture of illegal ‘Stalkers’ inside the Chernobyl’s Dead Zone – young men who sneak into the Zone for radiation thrills - appeared in Slate. Her writing is widely anthologized.

Morris is also the host of several television series’ including Treks in a Wild World, Adventure Divas, Outdoor Investigations and – for the past 12 years – the popular PBS series Globe Trekker, which is broadcast globally to more than 30 million people in more than 40 countries. For Globe Trekker she has crossed the globe, making programs in Zambia, Malawi, Niger, Syria, Paraguay, Gabon, Uruguay, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Borneo, Georgia, among many other countries.