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 poetic, 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 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival and more.
Her feature-length documentary, The Lanthanide Series, won the grand prize at the Seoul International New Media Festival in 2015; it has shown in Denmark, Portugal, the U.K. and had its New York City premiere at Anthology Film Archives in June 2016.
Espelie currently holds an assistant professorship in Film Studies and Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder; she serves as an Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism and is Editor in Chief of Natural History magazine, a centenarian publication for which she has worked since 2001.