The Big Questions

Open Date: February 7, 2025
Deadline: June 24, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. EDT
Funding Notification: November 2025

Curiosity is at the heart of humanity. The drive to better understand the mysteries of our world has invited storytellers to illuminate groundbreaking knowledge and the world’s wonders, and brought us closer together. Through this call for proposals, the National Geographic Society will invite storytellers to delve into some of these big questions – questions we’ve wrestled with for millenia, and questions that are only just emerging.

Every day, we are inundated with media – print, digital, broadcast and film – that influences our thoughts, conversations and public discourse. Too often, the media values sensationalism, treating knowledge as a commodity or a weapon to fuel fear, division and anxiety in the public discourse. In contrast, in its highest form, storytelling has the power to disseminate knowledge, prompt deep conversation and spark curiosity around the greatest questions of our time. The Big Questions on human flourishing, structures of reality and origins of life are key to understanding humankind’s purpose and place within the universe.
Supported by the John Templeton Foundation, The National Geographic Society seeks innovative photography, short film, writing, data visualization and other storytelling proposals to help people consider some of the greatest questions of our time.
These projects should in some way work to explore one of the following questions:
1. What does it mean to be human?
  • We seek novel approaches to this question, science-driven stories that help us understand our own strange, yet familiar species in a new way.
  • Stories may investigate human origins, as well as look into the future of human/machine interaction and shifts in human consciousness.
  • Narratives around experiences of spirituality, family, gender, culture, interaction with the natural world and more.
2. Curiosity: What are the boundaries of Earth, or more precisely, what are the limits to what we can understand?
  • Stories will take us to the edges of the physical, scientific, and philosophical world – and beyond. These will be the most ambitious and deeply geographic projects; journeys to the deepest parts of the ocean and the highest heights and – literally and figuratively – to more fully understand the natural world, ourselves and our place in the universe.
3. Human/Nature: What is the relationship between the human and natural worlds?
  • Among other topics, areas may include traditional ecological knowledge, wisdom of the natural world (including animal and plant intelligence) and how it shapes progress, evolution, and human flourishing, biomimicry and shared consciousness between the human and natural worlds.
  • Stories that spark awe and wonder in the cultural and natural world- Humans’ connection to, and reliance on nature – from the science of green space as respite and comfort, to the ways some cultures have historically and still view land as an entity to care for, just as it cares for us.

Instructions

Applicants may request up to $100,000, though it is recommended that if you have five years or less of experience, you request up to $20,000. Budgets of successful proposals will include reasonable, well justified costs directly required to complete the project. Successful applicants may use awarded funds over the course of one year. All applications should explicitly state the plan for evaluating the impact of the proposed work. Applicants may use a portion of the budget for Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT) or other security training, if applicable.
Apply Now

Photo credit: Babak Tafreshi