Wade Davis
Wade Davis is an explorer, Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, photographer, scholar, filmmaker and best-selling author.
Davis is a professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2013 he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the National Geographic Society as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”
Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology, and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. His studies have taken him all over the world. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best-seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland.
Davis is a prolific writer and the author of 375 scientific and popular articles and 23 books including One River (1996), The Wayfinders (2009), Into the Silence (2011) and Magdalena (2020). His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in 37 books and 130 magazines, including National Geographic, Time, Geo, People, Men’s Journal and Outside.
His vast expertise has also been showcased in several photography exhibitions he curated. Davis was curator of “The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes,” which was first exhibited at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. In 2012 he served as guest curator of “No Strangers: Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World,” at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. He was curator of “Everest: Ascent to Glory,” Bowers Museum, Feb. 12- Aug. 28, 2022.
National Geographic has published two collections of his photographs, Light at the Edge of the World (2001) and Wade Davis: Photographs (2018). His 40 film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series written and produced for National Geographic. His most recent film, El Sendero de la Anaconda, a 90-minute feature documentary shot in the Northwest Amazon, is available on Netflix.
Davis is one of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorers Club, Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of 12 honorary degrees, and recipient of the following medals: the 2009 Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the 2011 Explorers Medal, the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration, the 2015 Centennial Medal of Harvard University, the 2017 Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award, the 2017 Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration, and the 2018 Mungo Park Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2018 he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia.