Jodi Frediani
JODI FREDIANI is an award-winning nature photographer focusing on marine species and the marine environment. Her images have appeared in numerous local, national and international publications as well as on BBC and in National Geographic blog posts. She has also spearheaded fluke identification efforts on the Silver Bank, waters of the Dominican Republic. She has been swimming with humpback whales there for the past 18 years and taking her own and gathering fluke ID photos from other swimmers there for the last 14 years. She is currently collaborating with CEBSE, an environmental NGO in Samana, on a comprehensive fluke ID catalog for the Dominican Republic.
Jodi was born in Los Angeles and grew up largely in the San Fernando Valley suburbs. As an only child, her ‘siblings’ were her family’s cats and dogs, parakeets, tortoises and chameleons, leading to a life-long love of, and interest in, animals.
When it came time to go to college she was unsure whether she wanted to study art, marine biology or veterinary medicine. She told her parents she wanted to breed horses, but was assured that was just a hobby, and she needed a career. She settled on veterinary medicine, as it would allow her to work with animals, and she hoped to specialize in exotics. At the time, environmental and marine studies were in their infancy or yet to be born.
Jodi finally settled on U.C. Davis which offered a veterinary program, but after a year transferred to U.C. Santa Cruz, which had opened the previous year. She was not keen on the cow with a plastic window in its side or the irradiated debarked beagles at the Davis campus. At UCSC she studied biology and art, but took a long, circuitous route to finally getting a Bachelors in Art degree, with a focus on photography, many years later.
After dropping out of college for what she thought would just be one quarter followed by a trip to Europe, where she met her husband-to-be, the two of them returned to Santa Cruz, got married, had two children and purchased land in Bonny Doon just north of town. There they started an organic farm grew fruits, vegetables and dried flowers, and raised an award winning herd of dairy goats. Jodi still resides on the same land dubbed Yarrow Hill Farm.
Jodi traveled extensively with her parents as a child including trips to Europe and the Soviet Union, then continued to travel on her own and has not stopped traveling since. After her children grew up and her marriage ended, Jodi changed course completely. She became a TTOUCH Instructor training animals and training people to work with animals. Simultaneously, she worked for 35 years as an environmental consultant, protecting forests and forested watersheds.
However, it wasn’t until the early 1990s when Jodi went on a couple of Earthwatch projects involving whales and dolphins, that she was smitten by the marine ‘bug’. She went to the Bahamas on a project led by Ken Balcomb on beaked whales. However, weather conditions led to colder than normal seas and no whales were seen. On returning home, Jodi decided to check out the whales in her own backyard and went whale watching on Monterey Bay. She was soon introduced to the world of fluke identification by Adam Pack on Maui after joining his Earthwatch project a couple of years later. Curiously, she had had a vivid, memorable dream as a child about her family and a whale, which in retrospect seemed to have been prophetic.
In 2009, Jodi gave her first photographic presentation to the Monterey Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. She was then invited by Nancy Black to go whale watching with Monterey Bay Whale Watch whenever she wanted. Jodi took up that offer and has been photographing whales, dolphins and other marine creatures in Monterey Bay and around the world ever since.
Her latest venture is Wild Monterey Bay, a collection of real-life stories experienced and shared by a wide-range of people about their most memorable wildlife encounters on the Bay.
