
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Known for directing · Born 10 January 1966 · 60 · Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK
26 credits
Lucien Giles Castaing-Taylor (born 10 January 1966, Liverpool, United Kingdom) is a British anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography. Castaing-Taylor received his B.A. at The University of Southern California and his Ph.D. at The University of California, Berkeley. Since 2002 Castaing-Taylor has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. His works include In and Out of Africa, which he made with Ilisa Barbash in 1992. It is an ethnographic video about issues of authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the African art market that won eight international awards. He also recorded the film Sweetgrass (2009), which is described as "an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals." He is the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association’s journal Visual Anthropology Review (1991–94).
Known for

Leviathan
2013

Caniba
2017

Sweetgrass
2009

De Humani Corporis Fabrica
2023

Somniloquies
2017

Still Life
2013
8mm, archives des Sagawa, montées
2025

Commensal
2017
Lampedusa
2015

Ah Humanity!
2015

Day Break on the Bed Ground
2014

He Maketh a Path to Shine After Him; One Would Think the Deep to Be Hoary
2013