About the Filmmaker

Sharon Shattuck is a botanist, artist, musician, animator, and filmmaker.When she visits her hometown, she likes to trek the wind-whipped sand dunes of Northern Lake Michigan and identify her favorite plants by their Latin names. Like any good ecologist, she loves finding obscure connections in nature, and really tries to appreciate the creatures that make her life miserable, like mosquitoes and black flies.

After earning a degree in environmental science and biology from the University of Michigan, she assisted on botanical research projects for the Smithsonian Institute in Panama (where she lived on the famous Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal), and the Field Museum in Chicago.  Some of her favorite summers were spent teaching ecology and botany to undergraduates at the University of Michigan Biological Station, and playing fiddle behind her cabin, on the south shore of Douglas Lake.

When she's not doing science or making movies, she is an avid Irish and old time fiddler, indie songwriter, and visual artist (listen to her original music here and here!).  Sharon soon realized that she wanted to combine her love of science and storytelling with her more creative pursuits, so she looked to New York University’s graduate program in documentary journalism for help with the technical stuff.

Now, she lives in New York City and mixes ecology, health, and other science topics with music, sound, and handmade animations, to make films and radio pieces that explore the world in an exciting new way (check out her main website, Sweet Fern Productions, here!). She just finished an internship with the lauded NPR science show Radiolab, and is an animator and editor with Wicked Delicate Films, the production company of Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis (the boys behind King Corn), where she is creating elements for their new film about light pollution, called The City Dark, and is editing the new film The Greenhorns, about young farmers in America.  The goal, she thinks, is to entertain, and through entertaining, teach.