Meg McLagan

Meg McLagan is a New York-based filmmaker and anthropologist.  She directed the feature documentary Lioness (2008), which won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and optioned for serialization by Sony Television Pictures.   Recent work includes video installation Half Truths and Full Lies (2018) and multimedia project Air Drifts (2016), produced in collaboration with NASA and exhibited at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale.   She began her film career as a producer on Paris is Burning, one of the most acclaimed examples of 1990s New Queer Cinema.   
McLagan’s scholarly work focuses on the relation between forms of politics and visual culture.  She has published essays on human rights, testimony, and architectures of activism and is co-editor of Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (Zone Books: 2012).  She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Sundance Institute, MacDowell Colony, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, Mellon Foundation, School of American Research, and the Wenner Gren Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Fledgling Fund, Rockefeller Family & Associates, New York State Council on the Arts, and Impact Partners.  McLagan is Visiting Professor of Professional Practice in Film Studies at Barnard and affiliate faculty, Modern Tibetan Studies, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.