Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist and artist who works in film, video and photography. Since 2002 Castaing-Taylor has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL). SEL supports innovative and immersive media practices to explore the affective fabric of human and animal existence and the aesthetics and ontology of the natural world. His works includes In and Out of Africa, which he made with Ilisa Barbash in 1992, Sweetgrass (2009), an unsentimental exploration of sheep-farming in Montana also made with Barbash, and most recently, with Véréna Paravel, Leviathan (2012), an experimental documentary on New Bedford fisherman.

His co-filmmaker Véréna Paravel is a French anthropologist whose non-fiction feature Foreign Parts was shown widely. Her work explores evanescent forms of intimacy, mediation and space. Since 2009, she has been a Fellow at the Film Study Center and a postdoctoral associate of the SEL. She is currently a Radcliffe Fellow.

Tuesday, March 26, 12:30 pm
Alfond Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Image: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, Leviathan (still), 2012.