Atlas 337
Erin Espelie is a writer, editor, and filmmaker whose work connects with current scientific research, questions of epistemology, environmental precarity, and fallout from an increasingly image saturated culture. Her poetic, nonfiction films have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, the Whitechapel Gallery, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival, 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).
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. In 2017 she co-founded NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at CU Boulder, and continues to serve as co-director, overseeing graduate student and community grants, as well as curating regional exhibitions. A recent collaboration with the Cameron biochemistry laboratory yielded a live-culture installation at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. 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), as an extension of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, which she administered from 2020-2022, "Environmental Futures."