ERIN ESPELIE is a filmmaker, writer, editor, and university lecturer, based in the Colorado Rockies and New York City. As a filmmaker, Espelie works with a range of media, from Super 8 film to high-definition digital video, to make poetic, nonfiction cinema about issues in environmental history, current scientific research, and questions of epistemology. Her films have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Singapore International Film Festival, and more.

Most of her professional career in print has been on the staff of Natural History magazine, where she serves as executive editor and a columnist. Since 2002 her monthly column, "The Natural Explanation," has highlighted high-caliber wildlife photographers and human influences on the environment. She also freelances for a variety of publications. A scientist by training, Espelie holds a degree in molecular biology and genetics from Cornell University. She has worked in bacteriology and virology laboratories at the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Cornell.

In 2010 Espelie was awarded a Ted Scripps Visiting Faculty Fellowship in the School of Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder and spent the year researching the human microbiome and completing a film about the chytrid fungus. In the spring of 2012 she will join the faculty of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, teaching two courses: "Environmental Issues and the Documentary Arts," in conjunction with the Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, and "Contemporary Documentary Cinema," in collaboration with the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image.