Erin Espelie
- Department Chair
- Associate Professor
Address
Atlas 339
Erin Espelie is a writer, editor, and filmmaker whose work connects with current scientific research, environmental precarity, and fallout from an increasingly image-saturated culture. Her poetic, nonfiction films have shown at the NYFF, the BFI’s London Film Festival, the Whitechapel Gallery, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, CERN, and more. Her feature-length film, The Lanthanide Series, premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and won the grand prize at the Seoul International New Media Festival in 2015; an interview about the film appears in The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Oxford University Press, 2019). Her latest film, Ideas of Order, premiered at Full Frame Documentary Festival and First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City in 2026.
With degrees in molecular biology from Cornell University and an MFA from Duke University, Espelie taught from 2012-2015 at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Center for Documentary Studies. She co-directs NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at CU Boulder, which she co-founded in 2017. She has served as Editor of Natural History magazine since 2014 and her hybrid writing has appeared in Leonardo, the Brooklyn Rail, TiltWest, and her co-edited book, Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects & Prospects (Amherst College Press, 2023)—an extension of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, Environmental Futures(2020-2022). She has a book forthcoming in the “Studies in Nature” series with Timber Press/Hachette in 2027.