Lucas Bessire
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Lucas Bessire is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma whose work addresses extraction, power, and genre. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and creator of the Ayoreo Video Project (2017).
During his time at Radcliffe, Bessire is completing an auto-ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the High Plains. The book project charts how people inhabit the imminent ends of groundwater in order to reflect more broadly on the defining conundrums of our political present and the potential of ethnography to cross divides.
Bessire is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Science Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He earned a certificate in documentary filmmaking and a PhD in anthropology from New York University.
