User Profile

"Children are our greatest natural resource." My mission is to document culture, wildlife conservation and planet earth by collecting stories and sounds from around the world. My mission is to plant seeds and inspired students of all ages by visiting schools and engaging with the next generation of earth warriors. My mission is to do outreach far and wide by visiting schools on every continent and using music as an international language. Indigenous Aboriginal Australians believe the didjeridu is the voice of mother earth. I use the didjeridu to connect with and teach children and adults about how ancient cultures used to live WITH the land and animals.

Bio:
Growing up, Mandela spent a season in South Africa, a season in Montana & various seasons traveling the world with her flight attendant mother & vagabond father. At an early age Mandela fell in love with juxtapositions between cultures, music, food & weather of the northern & southern hemispheres. Mandela started filming her adventures when she was 14 & by age 19 started studying Mandarin & interviewing Chinese citizens on the edge of the Yangtze River during the construction of the Three Gorges Damn project. Mandela started her radio career at age 18 with a live adventure-travel talk show on KBGA college radio. The show ran for five years until it was picked up by the award winning KDTR Trail 103.3 FM & Missoula Broadcasting Company. She is still producing short adventure films in her spare time and when not in the studio, Mandela teaches Ashtanga Yoga & works as an international adventure guide/instructor in the field of whitewater rafting, bush trekking, whitewater kayaking, sea kayaking & riverboarding. She guides 15-day expeditions through the rapids & tributaries of the Grand Canyon April-October & records on location wherever the rivers of the world flow.

Mandela was raised on a nature reserve at the most southern point of South Africa. Growing up in the bush cultivated a passion for wildlife conservation & human rights which is a consistent theme in her broadcasts & outreach programs. For the past decade Mandela has worked on a series focused on the genocide of African elephants & rhinos, the slaughter of protected species of sharks in Australia, the use of 1080 by the New Zealand government to control invasive predators & heritage theft/illegal wildlife trade across Asia.

Mandela’s family made frequent trips to Australia throughout her childhood. Mandela started studying Aboriginal anthropology & didjeridu sound theory in Australia in her teens & has continued these studies into her thirties. In 2007 she started an organization in Missoula, which continues to educate students worldwide in didjeridu & Aboriginal anthropology. Mandela presents adventure lectures at the University of Montana & other public/private schools around the world. In 2016 her outreach program was able to connect with over 10,000 students in Thiruvananthapuram, India.

In between her international gigs as a whitewater adventure guide & instructor, Mandela travels to remote locations in the world interviewing fellow adventurers who live in radical harmony with nature. She’s recorded aging raconteurs, living legends, camera-shy thrill seekers & people thriving in little-known corners of the earth. Their stories inspire & surprise. They give us new insights about our diverse & amazing world. That’s Mandela’s intention. She aims to thrill and engage audiences by taking them to places they would never go, sharing the stories of people they could never meet & learning about our mysterious, sometimes dangerous, world filled with wildness, diverse cultures, hardship, courage & alternative ways of living and surviving.