MaryLiz Bender

Imagineer

MaryLiz is a creative storyteller, speaker, musician, filmmaker, explorer, analog astronaut, and technologist. She’s on a mission to inspire hope, elevate empathy, and unite through experiences of awe and wonder.

As Co-founder and Creative Director of Cosmic Perspective, MaryLiz has been documenting this new era of space exploration with her partner, Ryan Chylinski, through their films, VR experiences, and multimedia shows. They are driven and reverent for this work: To inspire hope and excitement for the future, unify the world through awe and wonder, and to archive for history what it is like to live in this time as humanity takes its first steps towards immortality into the stars.

As a musician and technologist, MaryLiz is deeply inspired to answer the question, “How will we take our humanity with us to the stars?” She is researching and experimenting with new tools of creation that aim to answer that question.

In the last decade, she's produced albums and toured the U.S. several times over, feeding her passion for multimedia stage production as a powerful form of transformative storytelling.

MaryLiz Bender.png

She followed her heart into deep research to understand how the Overview Effect transforms, backwards-engineering this process to bring it down to Earth. Like any transformation, it is a journey affected by the intentions we set, the presence we find, and the rituals and actions we put into motion to integrate new wisdom into our daily lives.

MaryLiz is currently touring the world with her live performance show designed to “bring the Overview Effect down to Earth”. The show, Our Humanity in the Stars, is an awe-inspiring multimedia presentation that lifts audiences to space to gift them the astronaut’s perspective of our fragile oasis.

Since 2017, MaryLiz has been interviewing astronauts and philosophers about the Overview Effect experience. Along with her community, she joined forces with her mentor and friend, Frank White to lead a movement to spread the empathy-elevating message of the Overview Effect with the world through shows, presentations, regular community gatherings, speeches, films, and books.