Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
I don’t dip my toes into anything. I jump straight in.
In our Fast Forward series, we profile alumni doing unique, interesting and meaningful work in their fields, inviting each to connect the support they received at Creighton, however long past, to the person they are today. See more Fast Forward features here.
* * *
Learn more about Jen Edney at her website
See more of her images here.
* * *
By Micah Mertes
Few alumni have forged careers as beautiful or perilous as Jen Edney, BA’05.
One of the nation’s most renowned adventure photographers, the Creighton alumna has traveled the world a few times over, clocking more than 80,000 nautical miles alongside competitive sailors for months at a time.
She’s been pitched against a boat’s bulkhead by 35-knot winds and massive waves. She’s trekked mountains and wilderness and gotten close (but not too close) to a family of grizzly bears digging for clams as the sun rose over Alaska. She’s shot images and videos from planes and trains, cars and motorcycles, boats and the ocean itself.
Her work has appeared on ESPN, ABC Prime Time, CBS Sports and in the Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, Outside magazine and National Geographic, which named her one of the world’s top female adventure photographers. She now runs her own adventure photography business, Edney Epics.
How did a landlocked, lifelong Omahan lose her heart to the wild blue yonder? That, Edney says, is the story of her life.
* * *
It was never part of the plan. When Edney first came to Creighton (from Marian High School in Omaha), she intended to follow in her family’s footsteps and become a physician.
“I quickly learned that wasn’t going to be my path when I almost failed biology my freshman year,” she says. “So then I tried business … and almost failed my accounting class. I’m pretty sure the professor had sympathy for me. I tried so hard that he let me pass with a D-.”
She was at a loss. Where do I go from here? What do I do with my life?
Fortunately, fate intervened. Edney’s residence hall roommate happened to be Shanti Psota, BSBA’05, the daughter of Eileen Wirth, PhD, Creighton’s journalism department chair at the time.
That connection (and the absence of any biology or accounting requirements) led Edney to the major. She would eventually graduate with a degree in graphic design and visual journalism.
Ahead of her senior year, she took a sports photography workshop, which prompted her to buy a Nikon camera. (She later named her black labrador “Nikon.”) When Edney returned to Creighton, she took a class with then-photojournalism professor Rev. Don Doll, SJ (the two remain good friends today).
The classwork included taking photos for the Creightonian student newspaper, and someone needed to cover sports. Since Edney’s Nikon was the “fastest” of the students’ cameras — meaning it could capture action shots the quickest — she was given the athletics beat. She covered it all, and all the while, she was a student-athlete herself, a member of the rowing team. (Perhaps a precursor to her eventual career.)
“I didn’t even know what I was doing with the camera yet,” Edney says. “I was really blessed to have teachers like Fr. Doll, Tim Guthrie and Carol Zuegner. I just tried hard and asked questions and learned along the way. That seems to be a common theme throughout my life. I don’t dip my toes into anything. I jump straight in.”
That’s true of her experience at Creighton. And with everything that happened next.
After graduation, Edney decided to take a 60-day Outward Bound trip. “When I looked at all the programs they offered, I ended up choosing an ocean-based one. I did so because I was terrified of the ocean.”
Edney’s fear didn’t extend to all bodies of water. She grew up on lakes, water skied with her family and (as mentioned) rowed at Creighton. But the ocean was mysterious; it was the unknown. It called to her as much as it frightened her.
Edney’s Outward Bound trip was the 2006 Winter Caribbean Semester. This included tall-ship sailing on a 150-foot schooner named the Spirit of Massachusetts, sea kayaking and camping along the southern coast of Puerto Rico, climbing, surfing, wilderness first aid, a three-day solo excursion and service work.
“Again, it’s the story of my life,” Edney says. “I knew nothing about the ocean. I knew nothing about ships. I knew nothing about sailing. But something told me to jump in, feet first.”
Part of its appeal was how different it was from everything she had known. “I didn’t feel like my childhood was sheltered by any means. But Omaha and the Midwest were mostly what I knew, and I wanted to meet people from all different walks of life, from different countries, different backgrounds and with different belief systems. I wanted this big, out-of-the-box, life-changing experience.”
She found that and more. That journey opened up the world. It allowed her to spend a few days on the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where she took hundreds of photos (which, she laments, she ended up losing later on).
“I remember sitting there, looking at the photos I had taken and thinking, man, this is what I want to do for a living. That moment will remain with me forever.”
On that trip, Edney says, she was reborn as a “child of the tides.”
* * *
After the trip abroad, Edney took a nature photography workshop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she apprenticed under renowned nature photographer and conservationist (and Nebraska native) Tom Mangelsen.
Then she attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Ventura, California. To help pay for tuition, she worked as a newspaper intern at the Ventura County Star, where she landed the assignment that set her down a whole new path.
Her big break came in 2009, when she covered 16-year-old Zac Sunderland, an American in the process of becoming the first person under 18 to sail solo around the world. The newspaper tasked her with taking Sunderland’s portrait, but Edney turned the assignment into a larger project. She left her internship to follow and photograph Sunderland full-time.
Along the way, a documentary crew filming Sunderland’s voyage ran out of money, so Edney was asked to shoot video footage in addition to photographs. As usual, Edney had no formal experience but dove into the task anyway. The footage she shot was terrible, she says. But it was her clumsy first step to becoming a professional videographer.
Following Sunderland led Edney to Cape Town, South Africa, where she was invited to embark on her longest voyage to date. She hitched a ride on a 37-foot boat to Florida for a trip clocking nearly 7,000 nautical miles.
“Of all the things I’ve done, that was probably the craziest,” Edney says. “It was such a small boat, and we probably shouldn’t have been crossing the ocean in it. Knowing what I know now, I would never do something like that again.”
But the six weeks it took to get to Florida showed Edney that 1. She could live offshore for an extended period of time, and 2. There are countless ways to photograph the confined space of a ship and the human beings who guide it.
Thousands of miles from land, untethered to everything she knew, Edney found her niche: long-voyage sailing photography.
For such a photographer, the profession's pinnacle is to work as an onboard reporter for the Volvo Ocean Race, sailing’s most dangerous event, dubbed “the toughest job in sports media.”
In the globe-spanning race, onboard reporters are embedded with sailing teams for eight months around the clock. “Covering that event was my Everest at the time,” Edney says.
She worked toward the gig for several years, putting in tens of thousands of miles at sea, building her skillset and establishing relationships with competitive sailors.
She was eventually invited to join the crew aboard the MAPFRE vessel in the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race. She trained for weeks beforehand to build the strength to move around boats battered by violent winds and waves.
This was a notable year for the race; it was the first time mixed-gender crews were actively encouraged, leading to the most women sailors competing in the event to date.
The experience was, as Edney expected, life-changing. It allowed her to up her game exponentially — as a photographer, videographer, storyteller and sailor.
During one rocky stretch of the journey, the boat smashed bow-down into a wave, throwing Edney into the bulkhead. Conditions were too choppy to stitch the wound on her head. Fortunately, there was some glue onboard.
* * *
Working as an adventure photographer of both land and sea, Edney strives to immerse herself in every story.
“My mission is to use every tool at my disposal to inspire others,” she says. "Whether it’s photography, film, writing, teaching or mentoring, I want to connect with people, spark their curiosity and encourage them to explore new horizons.”
She’s still discovering new horizons herself, some closer to home. Of all the places Edney has traveled and the sights she’s seen, it wasn’t until recently that she finally explored the main natural wonder of her own home state: the Nebraska Sandhills. She’s working as a drone pilot videographer for a feature-length documentary about them.
Viewed in a certain light, the undulating dunes covered in mixed grass — stretching nearly 20,000 square miles, as far as Edney’s eyes can see in every direction — look a bit oceanic. The wild blue green and golden yonder.
“I couldn’t believe I had never been out here. My projects have taken me all over the world, but I’d never explored so many parts of my own home.”
Nebraska might lack mountains and oceans, but there’s great beauty here, Edney says, and she can’t wait to see more of it.
“It’s going to be a fun, new adventure.”
* * *
