Robert Y. Chang (NYU Anthropology & Culture and Media, PhD '14) is an Emmy-nominated producer and is currently the Coordinating Producer of America ReFramed. As part of the Programming & Production team at American Documentary, Robert contributes to the curation of its award-winning documentary series. Robert is a member of the Producers Guild of America and has served as a juror, screener, programmer, panelist, and reviewer for a range of film festivals and arts funders. He has also judged for the IDA Awards, the Tellys, RTDNA Murrow Awards, and the News & Documentary Emmys. As an independent filmmaker, Robert's work has screened worldwide at festivals and is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER). Robert received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at NYU with his dissertation titled "Mediating the Dharma, Attuning the Sensorium: Technologies of Embodiment and Personhood Among Nonliberal Buddhists in North America." His doctoral research centered on media in order to highlight how cosmopolitan, immigrant, and religious identities are crafted in secular multicultural societies. By focusing on the religious media that Buddhist produce and use to attune their embodied sensoria, Robert also examined how this dispersed religious community appropriates a variety of media technologies as tools for generating modern religious subjects with nonliberal orientations. Most broadly, his research bridged frameworks of media production and embodied sensory practice; transnational formations of religious identity; religiosity and its mediations of social life.
Interviewer Melissa Lefkowitz is a filmmaker, doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at NYU, and graduate of the Program in Culture & Media.
Melissa Lefkowitz: What brought you to the Culture and Media Program?
Robert Chang: I’ve always been much more a “pursue your curiosity” rather than a “pursue your passion” type of person. As an undergraduate, I attended UC Santa Cruz. I was taking social psychology courses with Craig Haney and Stephen Wright, studying Chinese historiography with Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig, and exploring art history & semiotics with Raoul Birnbaum and Jennifer Gonzalez. By the end of my sophomore year, I ended up creating my own individual major before heading off to China for my junior year abroad.
Which, quite frankly, was a thirteen-month period where much of what I had studied up to that point didn’t really help me understand what I was encountering. This would have been in the late nineties. My experiences that year included: stumbling into frenzied opening day crowds at one of the very first Wal-marts to open in the country; attending “underground” performances by Cui Jian with friends who were much more in-the-know; discovering commemorative cigars celebrating Bill Clinton’s visit to Qingdao (after the Lewinsky testimonies); observing palpable anti-American anger and active protests in Beijing after a US airstrike demolished the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; dancing the night away at the “Half-in-Half” bar when a fellow student became a resident DJ–her boss was a then unknown transsexual ex-colonel of the People’s Liberation Army (IYKYK).
When I got back to Santa Cruz, I was really trying to make sense of my year abroad and received the very good advice to enroll in Lisa Rofel’s “Ethnographies of China” & Jacqueline Brown’s course on transnationalisms. It was in these anthropology courses where much of what I had experienced abroad began to make sense and fit together. It was then that I realized that I had been trying to create an anthropology major not knowing there was already an entire department of amazing anthropologists on campus! Anyhow, I had taken a lot of photos while I was abroad and, in light of what I was studying, I revisited these images as visual encounters with China. I was able to stage a gallery exhibition with these photos to challenge stereotypical representations of China. I took many of these images because they challenged my own expectations of what I would encounter in China. My finding of anthropology was made concrete through the use of visual media in this way.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a straight line from there to NYU’s Culture and Media Program. After graduation, I was an intern at the Asian Cultural History Program as part of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, I picked up tutoring gigs to pay the bills, and I also worked in a Baltimore cheese cave before ending up in development and fundraising at a literacy education non-profit. During that time, I always had the thought that perhaps I should pursue my curiosity and return to school to learn a little bit more about anthropology in order to better understand the meanings, conflicts, and transformations that emerge from making media.
So, I started scouting and checking out departments–and was very selective about the programs I applied to, because I was quite happy with my job. But when NYU called up with an offer, I was like, “Yes!” because its Culture and Media Program was a unique program offering the wonderful opportunity to learn about the history of ethnographic media while also providing the training to make documentary films.