People
Erin Espelie
Erin Espelie is a writer, editor, and filmmaker, with degrees in molecular and cellular biology from Cornell University and the experimental and documentary arts from Duke University. Her nonfiction films have shown around the world at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, the Whitechapel Gallery, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival, CERN, and more.
Her feature-length documentary, The Lanthanide Series, premiered at CPH:DOX and won the grand prize at the Seoul International New Media Festival in 2015; it had its New York City premiere at Anthology Film Archives in June 2016.
Espelie is currently Department Chair and Associate Professor in Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder; she has served as Editor in Chief of Natural History magazine since 2014. Her writing has recently appeared in Ethical Materialities in Art & Moving Images (Bloomsbury, 2025) as well as Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects (Amherst College Press, 2023).
Tara Knight
Tara Knight is a filmmaker, animator, and media designer for live performance. Her broad range of media practices includes animated shorts, dance collaborations, world-premiere projection designs, visual reality, and media installations. Recent projection design for live performance includes The Great Wave (The Berkeley Rep, 2019), Ballast (Diversionary Theater, 2017), and Hollywood! (La Jolla Playhouse, 2016). The Floating World, a performance she co-created with Malashock Dance, was awarded an Emmy in 2011.
Knight’s animated film, Unsettled (2018), screened at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Annecy International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb, the Black Maria Film Festival, and beyond. Her Mikumentary series of films have screened in institutions ranging from pop culture to fine arts, including: New York Comic Con, South by Southwest Interactive panel, Time Warner’s “Future of Storytelling,” animation festivals in Britain, Hong Kong, and Mexico, toured with Miku the hologram herself in North America, and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Knight has collaboratively created over two dozen short, improvised dance films including documenting the Think Gravity Dance Tank, an intergenerational research gathering in 2022 through a dozen films, audio interviews, and more. Current projects include Sound Planetarium, a multidisciplinary project to create an interactive, data-driven virtual reality experience for both artistic and scientific research, as well as serving that was presented at the American Astronomy Society meeting in 2024.