About
Tombolo
Tóm•bo•lo: (noun) a sand bar connecting an island to a mainland, or to another island; a type of isthmus
This geographic term was chosen to symbolize bridging the gap between science and art, as well as between the data and the map audience.
Tombolo Maps & Design is an innovative, woman-run design firm staffed with a combined experience of almost 30 years in the fields of cartography and GIS.
Alison DeGraff Ollivierre
Owner | Director of Cartography & GIS
Certified GIS Professional (GISP)
MSc, Geoinformatics • BA, Geography & History
Rachael Huerta Carpenter
Senior Cartographer
BS, Geography & GIS
Alison DeGraff Ollivierre founded Tombolo Maps & Design in 2010 (originally as CartoGraffics) after taking her first GIS course in undergrad and has been running it part-time ever since, completing over 75 unique projects for an incredibly diverse clientele. Her full-time job is as a Senior Cartographer at National Geographic Maps, where she's worked since 2016, focused on outdoor recreation maps.
Aly has received a dozen awards for her cartography and been recognized as one of Geospatial World’s 50 Rising Stars (2021) and xyHt Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Remarkable Geospatial Professionals (2018). She has co-authored books on avian field identification, participatory mapping, and island geomorphology and had her maps featured in museum exhibits across the U.S. and abroad. She is most passionate about maps that engage with local communities.
Aly is from Vermont, currently lives in Colorado, and has future plans to return to her husband's home in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Fun Cartographic Backstory: While at Middlebury College, Aly cofounded a campus magazine called Middlebury Geographic and served as its managing editor and cartographer which led her to intern at National Geographic after graduation.
Rachael Huerta Carpenter joined Tombolo Maps & Design part-time in 2023 after over a decade at National Geographic Maps where she specialized in creating topographic trail maps. While new to the freelance world, her considerable cartographic experience, eye for design, and persistence in problem solving make her a valuable part of the Tombolo team.
Rachael is a seasoned, award-winning cartographer with over 15 years of experience. Her dedication to making maps that are not only accurate but also visually captivating has earned her recognition and admiration within the industry. Rachael is an avid hiker and a fan of field testing her own outdoor recreation maps. Her professional passion lies in crafting engaging and informative maps that instill a sense of wonder about the world.
Rachael is from Georgia, lived in Colorado for over a decade, and currently lives in North Carolina.
Fun Cartographic Backstory: While at Appalachian State University, Rachael created maps for a weekly educational article for Maps.com called Geography in the News which was distributed to 8,500 schools and led her to intern at Maps.com after graduation.
Land Acknowledgement
Tombolo Maps & Design acknowledges that we live and work in the stolen, unceded, ancestral lands of the Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), located in what is now known as Denver, Colorado and of the Anikituwagi (Cherokee), located in what is now known as Asheville, North Carolina. We also call the traditional lands of the Wabanaki (Dawnland Confederacy), Mohican, and N’dakina (Abenaki / Abénaquis), located in what is now known as Vermont, of the Anikituwagi (Cherokee) and Muscogee Creek, located in what is now known as Georgia, and of the Taíno and Kalinago (Island Carib), located in what is now known as the country of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, home.
All of these places have significantly and unequivocally shaped who we are and the work that we do.
We commit our support to North American Indigenous communities through financial donations to Sovereign Bodies Institute, a non-profit research center dedicated to “build[ing] on Indigenous traditions of data gathering and knowledge transfer to create, disseminate, and put into action research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people”, founded by Indigenous cartographer, Dr. Annita Hetoevėhotohke'e Lucchesi.
We also acknowledge the legacy of forced, unpaid, African-descendant labor and settler colonialism at the foundation of both the nations of the United States of America and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. We serve on the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) Diversity & Inclusion Committee and seek to support African-descendants in our GIS community through mentorship opportunities. If you're interested in connecting with or supporting community groups, we recommend NorthStar of GIS and Black Girls M.A.P.P. (Mapping with Action to Pioneer Progress).