Our Team
Shanee Stopnitzky
Founder/Director
Shanee Stopnitzky is a complex systems marine ecologist, evangelist of embodying wonder, experiential artist and mother of submarines. She collects large and logistically complicated sources of magic that she loves sharing with others, and is dedicated to bringing the importance of awe back into popular imagination with the submersibles. She has spent a year of her life underwater in aggregate, and plans to use what she learns from the subs as a stepping stone to build a diving underwater house in the future.
Shanee’s dream expedition: the Tonga Trench
Taran Smith
Technical Manager
Raised on a boat and taught to fly planes as a child, Taran Smith found piloting a submarine to be the obvious next step. He knows the ocean as the greatest source of awe and wonder in this world, and loves nothing more than to share in its perpetual surprise.
Taran’s dream expedition : Antarctic Ice Shelf
Jim Mason
Engineer
Jim Mason is a General Specialist working at the intersection of engineering, anthropology and information science. Jim is the Founder and Director of The Shipyard collaborative art/build space for large scale mechanical, kinetic and electronic art, and ALL Power Labs, a company that is creating tools for distributed power generation and biomass thermal conversion.
Jim’s dream expedition: the Sea of Cortez
Linz Wilbur
Media Producer
Linz Wilbur is a researcher, strategist and filmmaker. She likes making media to explore the culture of science and technology, and the conditions for life in this universe. She’s worked with the team behind the short film Overview (2012), and the feature documentary Planetary (2015), and assisted in the production of Mission Blue and Sea of Hope. She is currently focused on contemporary submersible culture.
Linz’s dream expedition: the Clarion Clipperton Zone, the next frontier for mining in the high seas.
