Lucien Castaing-Taylor

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an assistant professor of visual and environmental studies and anthropology in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, associate director of the Film Study Center, and director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. He has recently completed eight video works that use different stylistic registers to explore the affective sensibility of human-to-animal and culture-to-nature relationships in the contemporary American West.

With Ilisa Barbash, an associate curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Castaing-Taylor is currently completing Sweetgrass, a feature-length film depicting the seasonal movement of a band of sheep and their herders with the last grazing permit in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. At Radcliffe, he will also work on a series of still photographs from the same project and begin new sound and video work on contemporary pastoralists in the Alps and the Pyrenees.

Castaing-Taylor’s work has been exhibited at the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Amie and Tony James Gallery in New York City. He has coedited, with Barbash, The Cinema of Robert Gardner (Berg Publishers, 2007); cowritten, with Barbash, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (University of California Press, 1997); and edited Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. (Routledge, 1994) and Transcultural Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1998), by David MacDougall. Castaing-Taylor earned a master of arts in visual anthropology from the University of Southern California and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.