Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist and video artist born in Liverpool, UK in 1966. Since 2002, he has been teaching at Harvard University where he is head of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. His first acclaimed work, “In and Out of Africa”, co-directed with Ilisa Barbash in 1992, is an ethnographical film describing the situation and different actors in Africa’s contemporary art scene. His 2009 film “Sweetgrass” is a sensory evocation of the lives of the last shepherds in the American West. In 2012, with Verena Paravel, he co-directed “Leviathan”, an experimental film about industrial fishing in North America. It was selected at the Locarno festival and awarded a prize at the Entrevues Belfort Film Festival in France. In 2017, he and Paravel co-directed “Caniba” a documentary about and with Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man accused of having killed and eaten a Dutch student in Paris in 1981. Their next feature film, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (The Fabric of the Human Body) is one of the 20 projects competing in the special “The Films After Tomorrow” section of the 2020 Locarno Film Festival.