ELSA SEBASTIAN
Last Stands Team + Film Producer
Elsa grew up in the fishing village of Point Baker on northern Prince of Wales Island, and currently lives in Sitka Alaska. For most of her 20s, Elsa captained a commercial salmon troller, fishing the wild coastline of Southeast Alaska. These days, Elsa deckhands on a drift gillnetter in Bristol Bay, and is an apprenticing woodworker. Elsa is a 100-ton licensed captain and some of the best moments of her life have been spinning on anchor in wild coves of the Tongass howling for wolves who sometimes howl back.
— email Elsa / Instagram @elsa_sea_bass
DR. NATALIE DAWSON
Last Stands Team + Film Advisor
Natalie currently serves as the Executive Director of Audubon Alaska. Natalie spent over a decade working as a research biologist in Southeast Alaska, and she eventually received her PhD studying endemic mammals of the Tongass. When Natalie first started bushwhacking with Last Stands team in 2017, she was working as the Director of the Wilderness Institute at the University of Montana, where she taught the Wilderness and Civilization program. She is most at home shwacking through Vaccinium and Oplopanax in orange, commercial fishing grade, Helly Hansen raingear.
Instagram @natstracks
MARA MENAHAN
Last Stands Team
Mara joined Last Stands in 2017, bringing with her the tradition of natural history illustration. She began her career as an artist-naturalist working at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. as the in-house botanical illustrator. Since then, she’s worked to document threatened landscapes across North America, painting the rare and endemic flora of the Baja peninsula, the ice and sky of the Greenland ice sheet and now the temperate rainforest communities of Southeast Alaska. Like the grey whales and other animals who migrate, Mara’s seasonal job as a science technician keeps her life on the road, but that’s okay cause she loves long distances and she’s always looking for things to paint, dead or alive.
Instagram @maramenahan
COLIN ARISMAN
Director + Cinematographer
Colin got his start with filmmaking when he hiked the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail with a camera in hand. Today as a non-fiction filmmaker, photographer, and writer, he continues to be drawn to wide-open spaces and wild critters. Colin’s visual storytelling focuses on ecology, outdoor culture, conservation, wild foods and rural communities. Colin’s a Vermonter at heart, and he’s building off-grid cabin near his childhood home, but he also spends a lot of time exploring the Tongass with his partner, living the Inside Passage version of #vanlife aboard a 22-foot c-dory.
— email Colin / Instagram @colin_arisman
GLEB MIKHALEV
Cinematographer
Gleb first came to Alaska to work with Sitka Conservation Society. He returned in the summer of 2015 with the support of a National Geographic Young Explorer grant to assist with an archaeological uncovering of an 1813 Russian shipwreck. In 2017, Gleb started as a full-time Director of Photography for VICE News Tonight on HBO, and spent the next couple of years traveling the country with the VICE team. Gleb recently built a beautiful sauna in the Catskills, and it’s his favorite place to park his bus.
Instagram @glebfish