Watch Jim Carrier -

Jim Carrier | Director/Writer and founder of the Wisconsin Film School

Jim Carrier is an award-winning journalist, author, civil rights activist and entrepreneur. In a 40-year career, Jim has worked as a radio newsman, AP editor and correspondent, newspaper managing editor, roaming columnist and freelance writer and filmmaker.
Author of nine books, he also has been published in the National Geographic, the New York Times, Sail and Cruising World magazines.

For 13 years Jim roamed the American West as the Rocky Mountain Ranger for The Denver Post, which took him through 500,000 miles, 7,665 sunsets and 87 pairs of Levis.
In 1997, Carrier bought a sailboat, named it Ranger, and set out to sail the Pacific. He diverted to Alabama because of a hate crime against a black man. Volunteering at the Southern Poverty Law Center, he wrote Ten Ways to Fight Hate, a community guide distributed to one million officials, students and human rights activists. In 1999, Carrier developed Tolerance.org, which has won two Webbys for activist Web sites.

In 2002, Carrier sailed Ranger across the Atlantic to Portugal, Spain and into the Mediterranean, journeys chronicled in “Cruising World.” In 2003 he combined his love of navigation and story telling in IntelliTours, a technology company that creates GPS-guided audio tours.

In 2005, after losing his home and office in Hurricane Katrina, he returned to Montgomery where he wrote, directed and narrated, “Faces in the Water,” a documentary film featured in the Civil Rights Memorial Center.

Carrier and his daughter, Amy, descend from Martha Carrier who was wrongly hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Carrier resides in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife, Trish O’Kane, a journalist and PhD candidate in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin. He is an avid banjo player.