Maya Craig is a documentary filmmaker and director of photography based in San Francisco and working internationally. Her focus is on character-driven storytelling about climate and the environment, with a specialization in vérité cinematography. She has been a National Geographic Explorer since 2019 looking at the global climate and geopolitical impacts of a warming Arctic, a journey that has brought her to Alaska, Svalbard, Iceland, and across Europe to film with scientists, explorers, and indigenous communities. Her NGS-supported short film Healy (Jackson Wild Media Awards finalist 2023) was featured at the COP28 Ocean’s Pavilion. Maya was a DP and coproducer on feature documentary The Battle for Laikipia, about land conflict in Northern Kenya, which premiered in the World Cinema Competition at Sundance 2024 and has won numerous awards internationally including Hot Docs, Durban, Guadalajara, CinemAmbiente and others. As director of photography for Swiftwater Films, Maya has shot a number of documentaries about conservation in the Western US including features The Lost Salmon (Emmy Award NW 2023) and Covenant of the Salmon People (Emmy Award NW 2024), and shorts Undammed (Jackson Wild Media Awards winner 2024), Bring the Salmon Home (Jackson Wild Media Awards finalist 2022), and Guardians of the River (EarthXFilm Impact Award 2021). The team is now in post-production on feature Undamming Klamath with support from the Redford Center, chronicling the largest river restoration project ever undertaken, currently underway on the Klamath River. Maya’s first documentary Water Town, about a water privatization conflict in Northern California, was broadcast nationally on PBS and helped lead to the town securing its water rights. Maya brings a background in creative agency production and has directed and shot brand collaborations with Patagonia, Google, National Geographic Society, Vox, Vogue and others. She is a fellow at London’s Royal Geographical Society, and holds an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science from Colorado College and a Master’s in Documentary Film from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
maya@mayacraig.com | +1 415.302.2745