In Brief
With degrees from Harvard and Princeton, Taya worked at several tech startups in San Francisco before moving to South Africa to pursue a career in human security research. She started jumping out of airplanes for fun on weekends. After her first wingsuit jump in 2004, she quickly became one of the most experienced flyers and instructors in a male-dominated arena. A skydiving pioneer, she led multiple world records and helped birth a new type of interdisciplinary flying called XRW. She founded one of the first skydiving non-profits, Raise the Sky, which connected human flight projects to charitable causes. Taking up BASE jumping in 2011, Taya was part of a generation that experienced deep loss to that sport. She is now retired from full-time jumping and lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with her husband and daughter.
A Longer Version (TL;DR)
Taya’s unconventional career path was defined by risk, from interviewing gun traffickers in remote parts of Africa as an independent researcher to leading a team of wingsuit skydivers to a world record.
Taya led and engineered the world's largest wingsuit formations, including the largest one ever flown, comprised of 100 wingsuit skydivers who jumped from 5 airplanes. She was the first woman and one of the first skydivers to perform the now-popular discipline she named XRW (“Extreme Relative Work”), flying and docking with a high-performance parachute pilot while wearing a wingsuit in freefall. Her dedicated advocacy over a 6-year period led to the World Airsports Federation (FAI) recognizing wingsuiting as an official discipline for the first time in 2015.
Taya translated her years of experience and leadership into wingsuit training company Lightning Flight, which had two year-round locations in Southern California at Skydive Perris and Skydive Elsinore. When she retired from full-time jumping, she closed Lightning Flight and passed the torch to the next generation of coaches.
Taya has experienced life-changing loss on her journey, from her partner Eric “tonto” Stephenson in 2007 to her best friend and teammate Jessica Edgeington in 2015 (both to skydiving accidents). The list of others is so long that it prompted friends to send her copies of the darkly humorous “All My Friends Are Dead” when it was first published.
In part shaped by these losses, Taya has consistently sought to connect her own risk-taking to a larger sense of purpose and to help others do the same. When she founded non-profit Raise the Sky in 2009 to link skydiving projects to charitable causes, it was one of the only organizations attempting to move stories of human flight away from a purely daredevil, macho lens. Since then, other groups like the Women’s Skydiving Network have followed the path she laid out.
Taya’s unique perspectives on finding meaning in risky environments and managing fear and loss form the foundation of her writing and speaking on these topics.
Media
In-depth interview and photos (in pdf) by Zach Lewis in Blue Skies Magazine (2017)
Profile by Brian Giboney in Parachutist Magazine (2011)
10 Questions for the CYPRES blog (2017)
"Why I Still Skydive" by Taya Weiss in Smithsonian Magazine (2015)