Mehgan Heaney-Grier

Mehgan Heaney-Grier, born Mehgan Renee Heaney on August 26, 1977, is an American champion freediver, fashion model, actress, conservationist, and television personality. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, to Bill and Renee Heaney, her parents divorced when she was six years old. At the age of eleven, after her mother remarried to Nelson Grier in the summer of 1989, she relocated to the Florida Keys along with her sister Erin, her mother, and her stepfather. At sixteen years old, she legally changed her last name to Heaney-Grier.

In 1996, at eighteen years old, Heaney-Grier established the first U.S. constant weight freediving record by diving to a depth of 155 feet (47 meters) on a single breath of air. She surpassed her own record the following year with a dive to 165 feet (50 meters). She went on to captain the first United States Freediving Team to compete at the World Cup Freediving Championships in Sardinia, Italy, in 1998. In 2000, she was inducted as part of the inaugural roster into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.

Parallel to her athletic endeavors, Heaney-Grier worked as a fashion model and brand representative. She was featured in publications and catalogs including People, Outside, Life, Vogue Japan, and Abercrombie & Fitch, and served as a public relations ambassador for Omega Watches. She was also featured in the books A Family of Women by Carolyn Jones and Freedive! by Terry Maas and David Sipperly.

Heaney-Grier expanded into stunt work for major feature films, specializing in underwater performances. In 2003, director Gore Verbinski recruited her to perform an underwater stunt for Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. She subsequently performed scuba diving, freediving, and shark stunts as a stunt double for Jessica Alba and Ashley Scott in Into the Blue, and for actress Olivia Wilde in Turistas.

In the late 1990s, Heaney-Grier collaborated with diving trainers Manny Puig and Mark Rackley to form the company Extreme Encounters, producing footage of close underwater encounters with alligators and sharks. Their footage resulted in the 20-episode Animal Planet series Extreme Contact and the USA Network special Deep Diver: Tiger Shark Odyssey. Her television work also includes a guest role on Baywatch, a starring role in the movie Avalon: Beyond the Abyss, hosting Saturn's Gravity Files covering the 2004 Gravity Games, hosting ESPN's Mad Fin Shark Series in 2008, and co-starring on the 2015 reality series Treasure Quest: Snake Island.

Over her career, Heaney-Grier appeared as a featured guest on programs such as Late Show with David Letterman, TFI Friday, Primetime Live with Anderson Cooper, and Ripley's Believe it or Not. She married Silas Binkley on June 6, 2010, and they have one child, Cash, born in 2013. In 2011, she graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with B.A. degrees in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, as well as Anthropology. She also became the guardian of a rescued wolf-dog hybrid named Rontu to prepare for animal-assisted therapy work.