Sweetgrass: Filmmaker Bios

Working in Montana on and off since 2001, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have deployed varying styles in film, video and photography to explore the monumental Western landscapes and the subjective, mythologizing response of humans to the land. Forthcoming video installations by Castaing-Taylor include Hell Roaring Creek, Coom Biddy, Into-the-Jug (Geworfen), Turned at the Pass, Breakfast, Daybreak on the Bed Ground, Bedding Down and The High Trail.

Barbash and Castaing-Taylor's previous credits include Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), a video about authenticity, taste and racial politics in the African art market that won eight international awards. Their work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum, the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and the James Gallery at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Their written publications include Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (University of California Press, 1997) and The Cinema of Robert Gardner (Berg, 2007).

A native of Liverpool, England, Castaing-Taylor was the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association's Visual Anthropology Review, which he edited from 1991 to 1994, and edited both Visualizing Theory (Routledge, 1994) and Transcultural Cinema, a collection of essays by the ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (Princeton University Press, 1998). He is the director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, director of the Film Study Center and co-director of graduate studies in critical media practice at Harvard University, where he teaches visual and environmental studies and anthropology. He earned a master's degree in visual anthropology from the University of Southern California and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Barbash, a New York City native, is associate curator of visual anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. She received a bachelor's degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont and a master's degree in visual anthropology from the University of Southern California.