Hyatt Mamoun
Hyatt Mamoun is a young filmmaker and producer based in the American South. Her passion lies in sharing her curiosity about the natural world, which viewers will get to see during this 4-part mini-series Wild Wild South: Lowcountry Edition.
In some ways Hyatt is a quintessential southern girl - full of charm, y’alls and a great love of ‘picking around in a creek’. In other ways, she refutes stereotypes as a wildlife camerawoman of Lebanese descent, who switched her childhood dolls for dinosaurs. Hyatt is the ‘every person’s wildlife expert’ - more a born nature lover, than an academic one. In fact, she’d been told she’d never be able to work as a scientist due to her struggles with math. She, like many of the southern wildlife ‘experts’ she meets, learned most of what she knows from a lifelong obsession with the wildlife in her own backyard, that started with the school of ma and pa. Her father who (escaping the war) moved to the American South on a whim, due to a love for both cowboy hats and the song ‘Carolina on my mind’, met her mother working in Dunkin’ Donuts. Both parents, after settling in Georgia, instilled their deep love of the south’s nature (and ironically also, a passion for four-wheel overland driving) in their kids on regular road trips.
After discovering the power of storytelling during her time at film school (unrelated to wildlife), Hyatt realized she could combine two of her greatest passions and work with animals after all. She picked up a camera and never looked back - gaining a master's degree in wildlife and environmental filmmaking from American University, where she was a center scholar and won a SE student Emmy for her short film about dolphins in South Carolina. She has an unparalleled drive for conservation through education and entertainment, and an uncanny knack for charming the locals into showing her their secret nature spots. She spends most of her time exploring the backwoods, filming creatures that she knows will spark interest in the average viewer. At just 28 years of age, she is still growing into her camerawoman (cowboy) boots, but her passion is simply to share the magic of her own backyard, learning as she goes and proving that anyone, anywhere, can be an advocate for their local wildlife.
