A recently named National Geographic Explorer, Livnat collaborates with government, scientific and educational institutions worldwide and has produced work for municipalities and organizations in the Red Sea, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. His award-winning films are part-documentary, part-PSA; they employ laboriously captured footage of marine life to communicate, for example, the importance of coral reefs, the destruction tourists and negligent divers wreak and the presence of discarded garbage that animals inevitably eat.

Livnat’s current project, Plastic Free Red Sea, models new approaches to using the arts, media and social science to cultivate lasting, positive change for the world’s aquatic ecosystems. In an effort to further humanize endangered aquatic creatures and encourage the empathy necessary to inspire change, Plastic Free Red Sea will use puppets filmed underwater and within marine environments as characters to educate the public and drive interaction—think Jacques Cousteau meets Jim Henson.

“Nobody has ever done underwater puppets before,” he said. “And now we understand why—it’s extremely complicated, technically!”

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