Matt Maynard is a British filmmaker, mountain guide, and MSc climate change scientist, living permanently above Santiago, Chile. His multi-award winning documentaries explore the intersection of people, culture, and mountain environments.

As founder of Earth Rise Productions, Matt has directed and shot projects that blend cinematic storytelling with environmental insight. His recent films include Laguna Negra (2024), produced in collaboration with Aguas Andinas, which explores high-Andean water ecosystems; Apu (2026), a socio-environmental documentary highlighting indigenous water stewardship at Cerro El Plomo (currently in production); and TransAndina (2026), a narrative journey across the Andes capturing human resilience and fragile mountain ecosystems (currently in pre production).

Since 2014 Matt has sought out and reported nascent stories on the ground throughout the Americas, well before they become well-trodden journalistic narratives. In 2016 he self financed an expedition into the jungle of the Darién Gap on the Panama-Colombia border , writing a subsequent feature and photo story for Geographical Magazine about development opportunities in the area following the disarmament and peace declaration by FARC. In 2017 he thru-hiked exploratory sections of the Greater Patagonia Trail, producing a photo essay and story for Outside magazine about how guerrilla trail-blazing may provide an answer to Chile´s woeful privatization of mountains. Later that year he travelled on foot through Sweeden´s Västmanland for the BBC to see if tensions and solutions stemming from wolves´ coexistence with humans in the region could be applied to a proposed rewilding programme on the private Alladale estate in Scotland. In 2018 he joined a small demo and road block about air pollution in central London, following the story of its founder and his escalation of its actions as it became the multi-national climate protest group, Extinction Rebellion.

In 2019 Matt began an environmental journalistic investigation that, after two and half years, discredited Anglo American´s $3billion Los Bronces Integrado project, finding they had used the erroneous Swiss norm to measure particulate matter in glacier settings and that their publicly available data actually revealed high levels of contamination on the nearest glacier that provides water to Santiago’s 6million population. Later that year, hidden in the back of a horse trailer, he smuggled an expedition of Chilean mountaineers and environmentalists into the public lands of the 142,000 hectare El Colorado and Olivares valley wilderness area on the outskirts of Santiago that had seen 50 years of neglect and industrial mismanagement since its appropriation by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1973. With photos from the expedition and expert comment from international environmental organisations, his stories for Geographical and Reuters revealed how the Chilean grassroots campaign to create a national park here, just 60km from the nation´s captial, would constitute the greatest conservation project ever witnessed in this massively centralised country. Parque Nacional Glaciares de Santiago was finally declared in 2023.

Today Matt continues to tell nexus stories of how people and then planet interact in mountain environments. When not working, he takes his two small children walking in the river in the mountain valley of El Arrayán where he has made his home in the foothills above Santiago, Chile since 2014.