Sebastian Copeland is an award winning photographer, polar explorer, author, and climate researcher. In 2017, Men’s Journal named Sebastian one of 25 of the world’s top adventurers of the last 25 years. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Outside, American Photo, The New York Times, People, USA Today, Paris Match, Stern as well on NBC, CBS, NPR, The Weather Channel and CNN’s Larry King Live.
Sebastian has been noted as a photographer “who has produced works that are of outstanding artistic merit and communicates messages of urgent global significance." Sebastian uses photography as a medium for activism. “Helping people fall in love with their world,” he says, ”is a catalyst to wanting to save it”. Sebastian won the prestigious International Photography Awards’ 2007 Professional Photographer of the Year for his best selling first book Antarctica: A Global Warning (Palace Press). In 2008, Sebastian released a second book titled Antarctica: A Call To Action. His latest book Arctica: The Vanishing North (teNeues) was released in 2015 for which Sebastian won the Photographer of the Year award from the 2016 Tokyo Int’l Photo Awards. It also won the ITB Book Award; and the Global Arctic Award’s book category. His fine quality prints have appeared at the United Nations (Solo Show, 2007); the Council on Foreign Relations; Peabody Essex Museum; the Field Museum and the BACC museum among others. These works can also be found in private collections in both the United States and Europe and several are now part of the permanent archive of The Natural World Museum in San Francisco. In 2018, the French Sénat awarded Sebastian with the prestigious solo exhibition around the gates of the Luxembourg gardens. This public exhibit of 80 large panels of Sebastian’s polar photographs reached 4 million visitors over the four months with an urgent climate message.
A Summa Cum Laude graduate of UCLA (’87) and the son of an illustrious family of artists (his father is classical conductor Jean-Claude Casadesus), Sebastian—a British/French/US national relocated from Europe to NY in 1980. His photography career begun with commercial assignments for international magazines and advertising clients.
A personal commitment to fight for the protection of the environment and a relentless pursuit of a sustainable future has led Sebastian to focus on visual arts as a tool for social change. Sebastian served on the Board of directors of Global Green USA (the US arm of President Gorbachev’s Green Cross International). A life-long waterman, climber and mountaineer, Sebastian has specialized his adventure skills to polar exploration, and re-tooled his commercial photography roots into Fine Art as a medium for activism. Since 1999, he has led various expeditions to the Polar regions. Sebastian spearheaded a media effort in the Arctic in 2005 in defense of the Inuit. He spent two seasons (2006 and 2007) aboard a scientific research icebreaker in the Antarctic Peninsula. In 2008 with partner Luc Hardy, Sebastian led a team of nine children from international nationalities to the northernmost Canadian Arctic as the Young Ambassadors of the Arctic. In March 2009, Sebastian led a mission to what is widely considered the most difficult expedition in the world: the geographical North Pole. He and partner Keith Heger walked seven hundred kilometers to commemorate the centennial of Admiral Peary’s reach in 1909. Sebastian chronicled the mission in his first documentary Into The Cold: A Journey Of The Soul. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and has won multiple international awards.
In 2010, Sebastian and partner Eric McNair-Landry spent 43 days crossing the Greenland ice sheet using skis and kites and without outside support. During the 2300 kilometers crossing, they set a new world record for longest distance traveled on kites and skis over one twenty hour period by covering 595 kilometers. The trip was chronicled in Sebastian's second documentary film, Across The Ice (2015) produced for Red Bull Media House.
On the centennial 2011-2012 season of the South Pole, again with partner Eric McNair-Landry, Sebastian led the first East/West transcontinental crossing of Antarctica by skis and kites via two of its poles, setting three world records over the 4100 kilometers/82 days expedition.
In 2016, Sebastian and partner Mark George completed the longest unsupported East-West crossing of the Simpson Desert, Australia’s driest area. The expedition was a training exercise for his second mission to the North Pole from Canada, in winter 2017, perhaps the last of its kind due to the rapidly melting ice. That North Pole mission was dramatically aborted due to severe frostbites. In 2021, Sebastian will undertake to complete mission, purporting to be the last team in history to reach the pole from land.
As an international speaker on climate crisis, Sebastian has been featured on television and radio (Larry King Live, CBS, NPR, Air America) and has addressed audiences at the United Nations, the COP21 in Paris, the World Affairs Council, and conferences around the globe, as well as Hewlett Packard, Google Headquarters, BMW, VF Corp and to Apple’s Senior Design Team amongst others. He has spoken at Universities, museum and embassies, as well as international climate summits addressing the systemic geopolitical consequences of climate change.
In 2011, Sebastian founded the SEDNA foundation whose mission is to report from the front lines of climate change, and study the relationship of climate systems with socio and geopolitics. Sebastian is regular a contributor to Men’s Journal and The Huffington Post, and Al Gore’s 24 hours of Climate Reality.
In 2008, Sebastian was named German GQ’s Man of the Year for environmental leadership. In 2009, he received the Founder’s Award from Global Green USA, and in 2010 the Gala Award for his environmental stewardship. He was commended twice by the City of Los Angeles, in 2005 and 2009, and received the Green Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design in 2014. In 2016, Eckart Witzigmann and BMW honored Sebastian with the Eckart ‘16 Award for Personal Engagement. In 2018, Sebastian received the Medal of Light from Thailand’s cultural minister for “sustained excellence in the art of photography”. In 2018, Sebastian followed in the footsteps of Jane Goodall and Arnold Schwarzenegger when he received the Bambi award in Germany, in the “Unsere Erde” (“Our Earth”) category. In 2019, he was knighted by French President Macron in the National Order of Merit.
Sebastian has two daughters with his wife, Carolin. He is a member of the Explorer’s Club and the International Glaciology Society, and currently lives between Los Angeles and Munich.