Justin Weinrich is a nonfiction filmmaker and visual anthropologist whose experimental practice explores the entangled relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Over the past decade, his work as a supervising producer and writer across genres - from natural history to true crime - has involved navigating the ethical complexities of storytelling, experiences that also drive his innovative anthropological approach. His projects for outlets including National Geographic, HBO, PBS, Arte, Discovery, and Smithsonian merge rigorous research with bold artistic vision, creating works that function simultaneously as ethnographic inquiry and compelling visual narrative.

Justin's artistic vision centers on "post-extractive ethnography" - a radical reimagining of documentary practice that replaces traditional subject/object hierarchies with collaborative, multimodal forms of storytelling. His groundbreaking experiments with AI technologies as creative ethnographic tools explore how emerging media might serve liberation rather than surveillance. Blending observational cinema with speculative approaches, his films practice "interspecies witnessing" - a bold aesthetic framework that challenges human-centered modes of seeing and representation. Through this lens, his work examines how cultural identity, scientific knowledge, and cross-species relationships emerge through the very act of looking and being seen.

In 2015, Justin founded Elephant Lake, an independent production company dedicated to experimental ethnographic filmmaking that challenges conventional documentary forms. The company's debut project, The Burning Field (2018), demonstrates his distinctive visual approach through "infrastructural ethnography" - following the daily lives of four young Ghanaians working in Agbogbloshie, the world's largest e-waste dump. Rather than imposing external narrative structures, the film's innovative aesthetic allows the rhythms and perspectives of its subjects to organically shape both form and content. This experimental approach earned the film the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 CinemAmbiente Festival in Torino, Europe's largest environmental film festival.

Justin's evolving body of work continues to pioneer new intersections between anthropological theory and documentary artistry, developing collaborative methodologies that honor Indigenous ways of knowing, multispecies relationships, and the agency of landscapes themselves. His visionary practice seeks not merely to document but to actively participate in creating more livable forms of understanding and coexistence between humans, technologies, and the natural world.

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