Twan Leenders: Meet Your Neighbours – Exhibition program
Have you ever taken time to observe the tiny frog sitting in your drain pipe, or chat with the caterpillars slowly chewing away at the leaves on your tree?
Please join us on Saturday, November 8, 2025, for an in-person program based on one of the Environmental Impact Award-winning projects now on display at RTPI, Meet Your Neighbours. Attendees will have the chance to hear Twan Leenders, a major contributor to the project and currently Director of Conservation at the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy, give a talk on his photography and contributions to the project.
Meet Your Neighbours uses portraiture photography intended to take the viewer’s breath away. Each subject is photographed in the field, against a white background. This technique not only shows the subject in great detail but reveals their translucent qualities too. Each subject becomes a celebrity, an individual.
Founded in 2009, Meet Your Neighbours is a worldwide photographic initiative created by Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt. The project reconnects people with the wildlife on their own doorsteps. These creatures and plants are vital: they represent the first, and for some, the only contact with wild nature we have. Yet too often they are overlooked, undervalued. This is conservation photography at the grass-roots level, asking people to care about where they live and showing them how extraordinary it is in a novel way.
This program will also be presented on Zoom for those unable to attend in person. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81963843829?pwd=ZfN8mWwEIxpAaPteePw78VM3elNbgP.1
Twan Leenders is a biologist from the Netherlands with a degree in animal ecology and lifelong experience in conservation management. For more than 20 years, his work with birds, mammals, plants, and especially tropical amphibians and reptiles has taken him to various places on the planet. After nearly 10 years at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, he now applies his expertise to our region with the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy. Twan has authored two field guides centering on amphibians and reptiles of Costa Rica. He is a herpetologist and enthusiastic wildlife photographer with years of field experience in Central America.
IMAGE CAPTION: Twan Leenders. Turquoise-browed Motmot, Costa Rica. Photograph, 2014. Courtesy of Twan Leenders.