How Award-Winning Filmmakers Nourish Las Vegas From the Inside Out
Ciara Byrne is an Irish filmmaker, Obama Fellow and the co-founder of the Green Our Planet nonprofit. Her life partner, Kim MacQuarrie is a four-time-Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, anthropologist, author and a GOP co-founder from Las Vegas.
They have always been interested in exploring different cultures, shining a light on endangered species, and supporting organizations that are committed to making the world a better place.
So how did these two people from opposite sides of the world meet, fall in love and build such a rewarding, adventurous life together?
KIM’S LIFE BEFORE CIARA
Even as a child, MacQuarrie was an avid reader. He credits books as the reason he has traveled so extensively.
“Growing up, I loved the book, “At the Earth’s Core,” by Edgar Rice Burroughs, about scientists who drilled inside the Earth and discovered a jungle with dinosaurs, native tribes, wild animals and a hero. I wanted to be that hero. By fifth grade, I had traveled the world through books.
“I also read “I Married Adventure” by Osa Johnson, who wrote about the expeditions she went on with her husband, Martin, a photographer and documentary filmmaker. The couple traveled by boat and biplane to exotic places like the South Pacific and Borneo, and I wanted to live an adventurous life like them.”
MacQuarrie also loved biology. He built his first aquarium when he was 5 and had lots of jars, with holes in the lids, filled with critters. By the time he was in junior high, his bedroom was a jungle of fish tanks and terrariums.
“I’d scour the Vegas desert. Water that ran off the Stardust golf course created a swampy environment, and my friends and I would search for wildlife,” laughed MacQuarrie. “At 20, I hitchhiked all over Europe; hiked the Swiss Alps; went to Italy and Morocco; and spent more than a year in France. Once you see the world from another culture’s viewpoint, you become a world citizen, not just an American.”
Fluent in Spanish, he studied anthropology at the University of Lima in Peru. He spent four years in the country and did field studies in the Amazon, where he lived with the remote Yora tribe for six months.
“It was as exotic as I could have hoped for. I wrote about my experiences for the “Lima Times” and sold those articles to other global news outlets.”
Back in the U.S., MacQuarrie was hired by a biologist at Princeton University to write a bilingual coffee-table book about the Amazon Basin’s Manu National Park, one of the largest rainforest parks in the world.
He also wrote a script for a 90-minute documentary about Manu for The Discovery Channel that earned him two Emmys. Then PBS hired him to do another wildlife film, which is how he met Byrne.
CIARA’S LIFE BEFORE KIM
Byrne was born in Dublin. When she was 4, her family moved to Tehran, where her dad worked on oil rigs. They lived there for four years until 1978.
“I love traveling so much because I was exposed to diverse cultures at a young age. I’ve been eager to travel the world since I was 9.”
From age 16, she spent a lot of her summers in Paris. After high school, she attended university in West Berlin.
“I was there in 1989, right after the wall came down; in Prague when the anti-Communist revolution opened the country to visitors; and in Russia in 1991 during a coup when the government tried to overthrow President [Mikhail] Gorbachev.”
In 1993, Byrne got her U.S. green card. “I didn’t feel safe living in a big city like New York, so I went to Washington, D.C., thinking it was a small town,” she laughed. “I didn’t know anyone there, and I worked at a Mexican restaurant for a short time before getting fired because I couldn’t pronounce the items on the menu.”
Before giving up and going back to Ireland, she sent her resume to every TV station in D.C., including the BBC.
“I sat in their reception area for three hours hoping to meet the bureau chief.”
Byrne’s tenacity was rewarded when the bureau chief hired her as a research assistant. After eight months, she got a job as assistant to the president of a film company that sold projects to networks.
“My boss taught me everything about putting deals together,” she said.
Then she got promoted to program manager, and one night she saw a rough cut of MacQuarrie’s film.
“I couldn’t wait to meet this woman,” she chuckled. “I thought she had the soul of a poet.”
She soon discovered who she expected to be a woman—because of the first name—was actually a man when he came to pitch another series about Papua New Guinea, the Congo and Iceland.
In 1997, Byrne went to the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival with MacQuarrie, who won a prestigious award, and she knew then that she wanted to work with him.
KIM AND CIARA TOGETHER
MacQuarrie spent a year on and off filming Arctic animals in Siberia, while Byrne moved to London. There she developed content for Lion Television. They stayed in touch by email every few months.
When she and her boyfriend broke up, Byrne went skiing in Vail, Colorado. While in the state, she reconnected with MacQuarrie in Colorado Springs.
“He was moving to New York, and I scratched out his address and wrote mine on the boxes,” she recalled. “A short time later, Kim joined me in London.”
In 2010, they moved to MacQuarrie’s hometown, Las Vegas, to hone their skills in crowdfunding for projects in Africa. They never planned to stay, but in 2026 they are still in the Neon City, continuing to impact the local community and communities across the country through Green Our Planet.
They started it in 2013, and today the nonprofit is the largest school garden and hydroponic program in the country. It has a certified curriculum for teachers to instruct STEM classes using the gardens as a classroom.
“We love seeing the joy kids get from seeing a seed turn into a plant, which becomes food on their table,” said Byrne. “Because if they fall in love with nature, they may grow up and help preserve the planet.”
