About

Augusta Thomson is currently a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural and visual anthropology at New York University, where her 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, Augusta follows the complexities of social life. Her work is dialogical— engaging with diverse perspectives on humans’ entanglement with place, movement, and material life. She thinks about and reflects on the privilege of being a white, cis-gender storyteller and researcher from the West, embracing collaborative, pedagogical projects that reimagine the idea of collective authorship and creative community. She is currently working on several multimodal projects: Mobile, an interactive documentary project that features Learning from Lhagva, a short film about the impact of new media technologies on Mongolian nomadic women; CROSSINGS, a participatory media and memory mapping project that incorporates 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). She is 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 toward open access within academia, Augusta is committed to finding accessible outlets to share her research findings; and her 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 a co-founder of The Walking Collective, she has helped to produce podcast episodes and is working on the launch of an inaugural journal issue, Dispersal, that explores the interdisciplinary potential of walking as a research and pedagogical tool.

Her 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.

Augusta received her B.A. from Oxford University in 2014, and in 2014-2015 she was a Fulbright-Nehru Researcher, in Ladakh, India, where she facilitated a museum research project with Ladakhi youth and co-directed a video workshop with Tibetan refugees. She has 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 Wenner Gren Foundation. From 2017-2018 she was a Spiritual Ecology Fellow, with the Kalliopeia Foundation. Augusta completed a Fulbright Predoctoral Research Fellowship in Santiago de Compostela, in 2022, for her doctoral dissertation on the Camino de Santiago. She is currently an NYU Public Humanities Fellow with the Henry Luce Foundation.