Madeline St Clair turns imagination into action and stories that matter

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”

These are the words of the famous Italian educator, Maria Montessori, who understood where the magical inner worlds of imagination can take us. And how, given time, what might seem silly, funny or inconsequential has the potential to change the world. Indeed, if she heard the story of how Madeline St Clair came to be a coral reef biologist and filmmaker, it’s likely she would have been entirely unsurprised.

“I used to pretend that I had a pet seal and walk around the garden with it on an imaginary leash,” admits Madeline, laughing. “I constantly asked why we couldn't have a pond with seals in the garden.” This adoration flourished after a family trip to a seal sanctuary in Cornwall and lasted, well… a lifetime. “I just had this kind of indescribable curiosity about the ocean, and particularly for seals, from the age of two to around eight.” Today, she is an ambassador for the very same seal sanctuary, but there were years in between where she had her eye on a law degree. “I wanted to be a lawyer for a very long time, even though deep down I had this passion for the ocean”.

However, a tragedy when she was seventeen changed everything. “One of my closest friends died. It was unexpected and traumatising and I realised I wasn’t invincible,” she says. “You naturally lose your sense of immortality as you get older. But, for me, it happened pretty much overnight.” She immediately withdrew her application to study law and switched to biological sciences at Exeter University. “My parents were confused, but I knew that I had to do this, because life is short and I wanted to do something I love, something that mattered.”

By the final year of her degree, she was fully immersed and heading for a master’s in tropical marine biology. But at the same time, something about the field bothered her. “Science communication was really lacking,” Madeline explains. “There’s a quote that says, ‘science is only half done if it isn’t communicated’, yet I had only studied one science communication module. I knew that I wanted to be working with coral reefs and making an impact, but I also knew that I needed to communicate what I was doing”. It was understandable, as she’d worked hard to buy her first camera – a Canon EOS 500D – when she was just 14. “I won my school photography competition, but I wasn’t someone who had a natural eye – I just worked hard!”

Her first scuba dives showed her the reaction her images could bring about. “I couldn’t take my 500D underwater because back then no-one made the housing for it, so I used a small action camera,” she recalls. “I took these awful shots of fish on a coral reef – blurry and oversaturated – and showed them to my granny. She was so excited! I think that’s the moment I became a storyteller. I had the power to take something from one place in the world and give it to people who have no knowledge or connection to it. And that I could even see a little bit of excitement bloom in them changed the course of my career.” 

Filming underwater experiments (“we call them trials”) taught her how to bring science and filmmaking together. “You have to get the colour balance right, the white balance, and learn basic principles of filmmaking, like shutter speed, ISO, aperture…” she explains. “I got to grips with all of these technical fundamentals, while also being scientist. I watched YouTube, shadowed people in the industry and absorbed everything I could”.

You might think that this was quite enough to be getting on with, but not for Madeline, for whom every learning experience came with its own questions. And she had a huge one while diving in Indonesia during her master’s: ‘why aren’t there any local women working in marine science?’ The answer, to her dismay, was that this was not considered appropriate work for women. She had also noticed other gender-related issues in the field that really concerned her. Her response? Setting up a charity called Women in Ocean Science. She was just 21 years old.

Eight years on, Madeline recently stepped back as managing director (she is about to start a PhD in coral reef restoration), but the charity is, rightly, a source of huge accomplishment and pride. “Our main aims were to empower women, elevate and amplify their voices, and to create opportunities for them in the space of ocean science,” she says. “Empower Ocean is our initiative in Indonesia and Maldives, where we successfully trained twenty local women in scuba diving and marine science. Oftentimes, in small island communities, their voices are excluded from any form of management of the ocean. I hope we can raise funding to do more”.

In 2024, she was also selected to be Oceanographic Magazine’s ‘Storyteller in Residence’, a “crazy year” of doing the work she loves best – putting powerful tales into people’s hands. “I'm really proud of the stories that I told in that year,” she smiles. And it was the perfect segue into doing more of the same with Canon, Coral Spawning International and Nature Seychelles, capturing the reefs in Virtual Reality and inspiring in a whole new medium – something that is so very important to Madeline.

“I’m regularly approached by young women who say, ‘I want to do what you do – communicating science’,” she adds. “To know that I've had even a small impact on people who care about science, about the ocean and want to protect it, and share that through film or photo, is amazing.” 

Follow the progress of our work with Coral Spawning International and Nature Seychelles here on VIEW.