Pro
Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Biography
Véréna Paravel is a filmmaker and anthropologist. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It explores evanescent forms of intimacy, mediation, and space in a variety of media.
At Radcliffe, Paravel will work on Pavor Nocturnus, a feature-length nonfiction film that explores the practice of going to sleep, concentrating on its routines, rituals, anxieties, and fantasies. The film will combine documentary, experimental, personal, and performative approaches to this subject, which—unlike that of sleep itself—has been curiously neglected by artists and nonfiction filmmakers alike.
Paravel’s films include Foreign Parts (with J.P. Sniadecki, 2010), the Interface Series (2008–2010), and 7 Queens (2008). Foreign Parts won seven international awards, including the Leopard for Best First Feature and the Best First Feature Jury award at the Festival del Film Locarno (2010) and the Punto de Vista Award for Best Film (2011). A New York Times Critics’ Pick, it was also an official selection of the New York Film Festival (2010) and the Viennale (2010). Paravel earned doctoral degrees in anthropology and communication sciences from the Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor (born 1966, Liverpool, United Kingdom) is an 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).