An anthropology channel
that eases the pain and elevates the pleasure of learning anthropology by making key ideas accessible and engaging.
From funeral rites to extreme sports, ghost marriage to gender identity, AnthroDorphins fuels your spark of curiosity about cultures around the world and brings concepts alive through ethnographic film, animation, and expert insights. Created and led by Rob Lemelson, a UCLA anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker with decades of experience in the classroom and the field, AnthroDorphins videos are perfect for teachers looking to invigorate their lectures, students looking to reinforce their learning, and anyone interested in anthropology.
Produced by Elemental Productions
A team of visual anthropologists, filmmakers, and storytellers
Elemental Productions is a Los-Angeles based ethnographic documentary film company dedicated to the production of films focusing on the relationship between culture, psychology, and personal experience. Elemental Productions was founded in 2007 by anthropologist Robert Lemelson and evolved out of years of fieldwork and thousands of hours of footage gathered in Indonesia since 1997.
Meet the Team
WRITER AND RESEARCHER
Annie Tucker
Annie Tucker is an award-winning translator and writer specializing in contemporary Indonesian culture, literature, arts, and health. She received her PhD from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures, where her dissertation addressed the shifting understandings of autism and developmental difference in Java and the application of indigenous philosophies, arts, and knowledge systems in response. She was a lecturer for UCLA’s Disability Studies minor, designing and teaching original classes on neurodiversity, from 2009-2014. She has been a writer for Elemental Productions, an independent ethnographic film company making documentaries about Indonesia, for over a decade. With co-author Robert Lemelson, she has published two books on the practice of visual psychological anthropology. Her translation of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound has been recognized by a PEN/Heim Translation Award, the World Reader’s Award, and was a New York Times Notable book of 2015.
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DIRECTOR AND ANTHROPOLOGIST
Robert Lemelson
I am a psychological anthropologist who has worked in Southeast Asia, particularly on the islands of Bali and Java in Indonesia, for most of my career. My work explores the relationship of culture and history to trauma, psychiatric illness, structural and gender-based violence, and their relationship to subjectivity and phenomenology. I am also a visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker with over twenty years of experience conducting fieldwork and producing longitudinal film studies. In 2007, I founded Elemental Productions, an ethnographic documentary film production company. I have completed over a dozen films on a wide range of topics including mental illness, polygamy and gender-based violence, the sex trade, genocide, kinship and ritual, and trance and possession.
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Elemental Productions - Documentary Educational Resources - UCLA
EDITOR AND CINEMATOGRAPHER
MISC
Robert Chhaing-Carleton
Visual Anthropologist, Robert Carleton-Chhaing focuses on art, particularly film and music, as a tool for social change. His first documentary film, “From the Heart of Brahma” was about Cambodian classical dancer and LBGTQ activist, Prumsodun Ok. He has worked on multiple documentary shorts with Meta House/E.C.C.C. in Phnom Penh such as short docs on the civil parties to the Khmer Rouge tribunal and as editor for Sao Sopheak’s film about Sou Sotheavy, the only known transgendered survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide. Most recently he was cinematographer for the Smithsonian funded film by director praCh Ly, Satook. Currently, Carleton is a part time lecturer in visual anthropology at California State University Long Beach and works as a camera operator and editor for the ethnographic film production company, Elemental Productions.
Briana Young
Briana Young is a visual anthropologist and award-winning documentary filmmaker. She has worked on the Emmy-nominated documentary Superheroes, directed and produced a series of videos for Novica in association with National Geographic, co-directed the multimodal ethnographic documentary Tajen: Interactive, has been published in the American Anthropologist, and has produced, directed, and filmed in over 35 countries around the world from the Galapagos Islands to Nepal. Her short film, Screw It I’ll Play Make Believe, was broadcast nationally on the Documentary Channel and screened internationally at festivals, and her thesis film, Ladies of the Gridiron, was selected to be part of KQED Truly CA Shorts, and is used as a teaching tool on gender norms and women in sports, in classrooms across the country. Briana holds a Bachelor’s Degree in cultural anthropology from UCLA and a Master’s degree in visual anthropology from USC.
EDITOR
Chisako Yokoyama
Chisako Yokoyama has worked as an editor and assistant editor on studio motion pictures, independent features and narrative and documentary films. Her credits as editor include the English and Japanese language films “Saki,” “Takamine” and “Goemon” and as first assistant editor, “American Gangster”, “Memoirs of a Geisha”, “Black Hawk Down”, “Gladiator”, and “Good Will Hunting.”
Yee Ie
Yee Ie deals in planning, production, graphics, interface, websites and storytelling.
