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In 2022, Aayas Joshi found himself standing atop a snowy ridge above 18,000 feet with frozen snot on his face. After purchasing his first mirrorless camera, taking one of the most dangerous flights in the world, and hiking for 12 days across some of the most treacherous landscapes on the planet, he had finally arrived at Mount Everest Base Camp — and his one camera battery was dead.

What on Earth am I doing? he thought.

Joshi is a Morehead-Cain Scholar. The prestigious, four-year merit scholarship covers tuition, housing, books, fees, and four summer enrichment experiences — including a fully funded gap year before college.

Growing up in Nepal, he wasn’t used to resources like this. The average annual income is $1,400. One of his photography jobs paid $90 a month. Morehead-Cain gave him $7,500 for the gap-year program, which he used to trek to Mount Everest.

What he learned at basecamp follows him to this day.

Nepal sits among the Himalaya mountain range — a region that contains some of the biggest ice deposits on Earth. Warming temperatures increase glacial melting and flood risk, worsen air pollution, and threaten the agricultural sector, which employs most of the country.

While hiking along Khumbu glacier near Mount Everest, Joshi spoke with locals increasingly alarmed by how quickly the ice is receding, shifting, and flowing. Sections that were once frozen solid have begun forming small glacial lakes, which can burst under pressure and send floodwaters racing downstream. The result can be devastating, wiping out homes, farmland, and in some cases entire villages.

“It led me down this rabbit hole of how much climate risk there is to these remote villages and families,” he explains. “I considered myself a well-educated person living in the capital city. But I had no idea how much danger communities were in. That was terrifying.”

Many mountain communities in Nepal have some of the lowest carbon footprints in the world, often lacking roads, running water, and reliable electricity. Yet the Himalayas are warming about three times faster than the global average.  Confronted by that contrast, Joshi began reaching out to nonprofits and searching for ways to help. Then, he realized what had captured his attention so powerfully: seeing the change firsthand.

“I realized I cared because I could see it with my own eyes,” he says. “Even if others can’t be there, I can show them.” 

Since then, he has taken every opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill to produce films that explore the tensions and emotions behind deeply rooted environmental issues — from how Hurricane Helene reshaped Western North Carolinians’ relationships with the rivers in their backyards to how Hawaiians are recovering after wind-driven fires destroyed the town of Lahaina and displaced 12,000 people in 2023.

“At the end of the day, these aren’t my projects,” he says. “It’s our project collectively. It’s their story. I am just the medium through which it’s shared with the world.”

The filmmaker as ethnographer

When Joshi began his first year at UNC-Chapel Hill in Fall 2021, he committed to photography and friendship — taking on personal projects, covering assignments for The Daily Tar Heel, and challenging himself to meet one new person every day for 30 days.

One of those people was Anna Connors, a fellow student. Their first conversation sparked a shared passion for visual storytelling that would eventually lead them to apply for and receive the Rich Beckman Documentary Award from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media — and, later, the buffalo herds of Montana.

A good documentary filmmaker is akin to an ethnographer: someone who lives alongside a community, observes its rhythms, researches its history, interviews its members, and seeks truth through immersion rather than extraction. Instead of producing a written report, they create a visual story that invites the public to understand something essential. That’s exactly what Joshi and Connors set out to do.

Shades of fuchsia and seafoam greeted them on their first night in West Yellowstone, Montana, as they gazed at the star-speckled expanse. It felt as if the universe was welcoming them with open arms, the Northern Lights reaching out like elated tentacles. The date was May 10, 2024, when a massive geomagnetic storm hit Earth.

They had arrived earlier that day after a 34-hour drive from UNC-Chapel Hill. As the students pulled up to the wooden cabin on Hebgen Lake, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, they couldn’t believe this would be home for the next four weeks. Their accommodations had been arranged through the Buffalo Field Campaign — a nonprofit focused on preserving the last wild herd of buffalo in the United States.

In the early 1800s, as many as 60 million buffalo roamed North America. But widespread hunting by colonial Americans — for hides, meat, and to deprive Indigenous communities of vital resources — rapidly decimated the herds. By 1903, 23 individuals remained. Today, the Yellowstone herd hovers at about 5,000.

Joshi and Connors’ documentary, “The Last Wild Herd,” unpacks that story through the eyes of the campaign and the Indigenous community around it. Their 13-minute film has since been shown across four continents and earned honors from the White House News Photographers Association, the Hearst Journalism Awards, and the Wildlife Conservation Film Festival, among others.

“We followed our hearts, and it led us to the film that exists today,” Joshi says.

An empathetic partner

In September 2024, just a few months after Joshi released “The Last Wild Herd,” Hurricane Helene smashed into Western North Carolina. The historic storm destroyed thousands of miles of roads and more than 125,000 homes — and killed 106 people, more than any other state.

Through the Carolina Photojournalism Workshop, Joshi documented that ongoing recovery. He spent several days with Blair Belt-Clark, a Burnsville native who had spent five years building a tiny home along the Cane River with her husband.

“The flood happened so fast,” she told Joshi. “Entire families were just taken in the night without a warning.”

Her tiny home was swept away too. She and her husband watched it drift down the river as floodwaters raged. Joshi quickly realized this wasn’t just a story about loss. It was about Belt-Clark’s enduring love for the river — and her struggle to forgive the water she once trusted so deeply.  

He created “Adrift” in one week, the timeline required by the workshop. No matter how long he has to work on a film, though, his goals stay the same: connect genuinely, witness faithfully, and tell stories with care.

“I think often about our responsibility as storytellers,” he says. “Even when the story is about grief and loss, I try to highlight a solution or source of hope.”

Joshi pairs emotional sensitivity with technical creativity. His films include breathtaking vistas captured with drones, tight macro shots like an ant crawling on a leaf, and underwater footage in water-based stories to immerse the viewer.

“You can’t tell the story of how much life exists underwater without taking the camera under,” he says.

A witness to resilience

Joshi’s commitment to witnessing communities in transition extends beyond these two films. In 2025, he created a documentary set in Buenos Aires, following musicians who use the underground music scene as a quiet form of resistance against an increasingly authoritarian government.

He’s also developing a second film on Hurricane Helene, told through the eyes of a couple who lived along the banks of Western North Carolina’s South Toe River, which rose 25 feet during the storm. In the aftermath, waste-removal contractors were incentivized to clear as much debris as possible, driving heavy equipment into the water and removing logs that has been part of the river’s ecosystem long before the flood. In the film, the couple grapples with not only what they lost, but with the deeper grief of witnessing how human decisions reshaped a place they loved.

And, most recently, Joshi was in Hawaii working on his latest project: a documentary about the Lahaina wildfire on Maui. The film follows a young adult who lost her home to the fire and now spends much of her free time volunteering with replanting organizations to help restore native species and make the landscape more resilient to future fires.

“She speaks about how her generation is going to be the one that rebuilds Lahaina,” he says. “She wants to motivate more young people to be part of that recovery.”

Whether he’s standing beside a battered riverbank or in a dimly lit music club, Joshi keeps returning to the same question: How do people survive, create, and hold onto themselves when the world shifts beneath their feet?

He is quick to say his work is far from glamourous. The travel is demanding, the hours long, and the accommodations often sparse.

“There are moments of loneliness,” he says. “Moments of physical challenge. Nights without sleep. It’s rewarding, but it’s not easy.”

He expects more of these moments will come after graduation, when he moves to New York City to become a freelance documentary filmmaker. But whenever he experiences changes or challenges, he reflects on something his grandmother once told him: “In times of difficulty, don’t panic. But in times of prosperity, don’t lose yourself.”

“As a young person, there’s a lot of anxiety about the world we’re building,” he admits. “For a long time, the narrative of doom made me feel paralyzed. But hope keeps me moving. If we, as storytellers, can create hope for even one person, we can build a world young people want to be a part of.”