New Zealand born, Alayna Van Dervort is a Technology for Good Advisor, Visual artist, international speaker and dedicated wildlife conservationist. She started her field conservation career in New Zealand as a Project Jonah Marine Mammal Medic and went on to work with Wolves, Dolphins, Bears, Big cats and more.
Later she studied Photography and Visual Arts at Bard College and San Francisco Art institute and is currently studying with Harvard University sustainability and innovation Graduate Program. Alayna has worked with some of the world’s great visual leaders including Annie Leibovitz, Doug Aitken and Dutch photography duo, Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.
In 2016 Alayna cultivated her perfect union between Wildlife conservation & Visual Arts with the collaboration of disruptive Technology. She worked three years with Amazon AWS, Artificial Intelligence and Visual Computing team creating Ai for Good programs with Stanford Universities Big Earth hackathon, fighting child sex trafficking with Thorn.org, Deep Learning in refugee camps with Translators without Borders, and tech for wildlife conservation with Wildme.org. This is where she met Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf & identified the need for rapid, photographic data collection in Technology for conservation. The Big Wild was founded with a collaborative, Impact driven ROI’s to answer this need for measurable-impact conservation fighting the sixth mass extinction.
Alayna is a multi-published and award-winning photographer. She has been sponsored by Levi’s Go Forth campaign and Phase One Cameras. She is a National Geographic photographer and a grantee of Microsoft Ai for Earth.
Alayna is Chair of her local Silicon Valley, California environmental, conservation and sustainability committee. She is a mentor at Peninsula Bridge, empowering low-income students to achieve educational and college success and is a wildlife rehabilitator with the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley.
She is a strong vocal advocate for disruptive innovation and non-competitive collaborations for measurable impact on global conservation and climate action issues.
