I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural and Visual Anthropology at New York University, where my research meanders between mobility studies, theories of place and space, memory, ecology, digital media, visual culture, video ethnography, personhood, material culture, art, religion, and pilgrimage.
As a filmmaker, my work engages with and reflects on the natural world, through varied and often abstract stories. I am currently working on several documentary film projects: Mobile, an interactive documentary project featuring Learning from Lhagva, a short film about the impact of new media technologies on Mongolian nomadic women; Holding Space, an experimental documentary short about the Camino Frances, a pilgrimage route traversing the north of Spain; and Where the Horses Went to Die, a short documentary about Dead Horse Bay, a trash site in Brooklyn (produced in conjunction with the Center for Culture and Media at NYU). I am the Director, Creative Director, and DP of Nine-Story Mountain, a feature-length documentary film about the pilgrimage to and around Mount Kailash, a sacred mountain in western Tibet.
As a proponent of the trend towards “open access” within academia, I am committed to finding accessible outlets to share my research findings; and my writing and photographs have appeared in journalistic spaces, such as The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Elle Canada, Women in the World, the New Internationalist, Geographical Magazine, Al Jazeera English, and Wellesley Magazine. Most recently, as the co-founder of The Walking Collective, I have helped to produce podcast episodes and am working on the launch of an inaugural journal issue, Dispersal, that explores the interdisciplinary potential of walking as a research and pedagogical tool.
My films have screened internationally at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival; The Art and Tourism Film Festival in Porto; the Brisbane Himalayan Film Festival; the University of British Columbia; The Greenwich Village Film Festival; Tibet House; Oxford University; Harvard University; New York University; and New York’s WILD Film Festival.
I received my B.A. from Oxford University in 2014, and in 2014-2015 I was a Fulbright-Nehru Researcher, in Ladakh, India, where I both directed a museum research project with Ladakhi youth and co-directed a video workshop with Tibetan refugees. I have received post-production grants from the Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund and nextPix; a MacCracken fellowship from New York University; and research grants from the Peter Lienhardt Bagby Fund (Oxford University); the Oxford University Expeditions Club; The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG); the Soddy Trust; the Koerner Foundation; the Adrian Ashby-Smith Memorial Trust; the Scientific Exploration Society; the Explorer’s Club; the American Center for Mongolia Studies (declined); and the Kalliopeia Foundation. From 2017-2018 I was a Spiritual Ecology Fellow, with the Kalliopeia Foundation. I am a 2022 Fulbright Predoctoral Research Fellow, based in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where I am undertaking ethnographic research for my doctoral dissertation in Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University, exploring the theme of sustainability along the Camino de Santiago.