Mark Westmoreland, Seed Documentary Cooperative

Photograph by Andrew Robinson

Mark Westmoreland, Seed Documentary Co-op, is a cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. These fields have enabled him to meet people from many different walks of life and share their stories. As such, his work explores the potential for visual media to address under-represented stories. As a filmmaker he has made documentaries about cultural preservation in Ethiopia and the experience of minorities in rural Texas as well as the social implications of nanotechnology and the ubiquitous presence of surveillance technology in today's society. Mark earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and his doctoral research focuses on the significance of alternative media in the Middle East, particularly the way people grapple with national histories of violence in Lebanon. Mark is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. He is a co-founder, with Antony Cherian, of Seed Documentary Cooperative.