Join anthropologist Thomas R. Miller in a multimedia experience, “People Who Talk With Birds: Siberian Shamans in the Future Past.”

Siberian shamans are time-travellers and shape-shifters, moving across worlds and forms in the course of ceremonial healing and divination rituals. Through sensory mediation, Miller tracks their migrations and transformations between polarities of human-not human, animal-not animal, spirit-nature, living-not living, and past-future. Based on 20 years of Miller’s archival and field research, this multimedia presentation includes descriptions, interviews, oral testimony, images, film, and multichannel sounds from the first ethnographic wax-cylinder recordings to contemporary montage.

Thomas Ross Miller, Ph.D. is an independent curator, scholar, and media installation artist from Brooklyn. He holds degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University and Music from Wesleyan University, and teaches at Berkeley College and NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His specialties include visual anthropology, sound studies, museology, shamanism, and ethnohistory. A former staff member and Guest Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, he has been a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, and Drew University. He recently completed research and teaching residencies at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany and the Museum Studies graduate program at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík.