Toby Lee is an artist, anthropologist, and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She works across film, video, drawing, and text, and her work has been been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among other venues. Her research interests include visual and media anthropology, the anthropology of cultural institutions, cultural citizenship, expanded documentary, and cultures of surveillance and documentation. She is the author of The Public Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in Austerity Greece (University of California Press, 2020). An ethnographic account of the Greek film world in the early years of the “Greek crisis,” this book considers how the arts and cultural production illuminate the changing conditions of, and possibilities for, public and collective life in the neoliberal era. Her writing has appeared in Visual Anthropology Review, Millenium Film Journal, World Records, and Flow. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, where she was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the NY State Council on the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Dan David Foundation, Film Study Center at Harvard University, and Flaherty Film Seminar. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Director of the Collaborative Studio program at UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, NY.


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