We are living through a time of massive environmental and economic change — but most of the media we encounter still engages change through charts, forecasts, or partisan talking points. The result? Audiences tune out. The stakes feel distant. The story never lands.
So, what would it look like to tell this moment differently?
In this conversation, we unpack how to turn systemic transformation into emotionally gripping narrative. How do you find emotion and tension in slow-moving crises? Build character arcs inside environmental change? Translate research into story without turning it into a lecture?
This panel includes Academy Award ® nominated director Sara Dosa from the upcoming National Geographic Documentary Film Time and Water, currently playing at SXSW, Cymene Howe, Professor of Anthropology and Co-Founder of the Science and Technology Studies Program at Rice University and Dominic Boyer, Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience at Rice University. The conversation will be moderated by Craig Campbell, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UT Austin and it will explore how storytelling can help to reframe “big, abstract change” as something intimate, immediate, and personal. Because if the future is already unfolding, the real creative challenge is making people feel it.
Sara Dosa is an Oscar nominated nonfiction filmmaker whose work centers on the human relationship with more-than-human nature. The films she has directed, “Fire of Love” (2022), “The Seer & The Unseen” (2019), and “The Last Season” (2015) have been nominated for over 40 awards, won a Peabody and the Directors’ Guild of America Award, among others, and has been nominated for an Academy Award, BAFTA, Emmy, and an Independent Spirit Award. Dosa’s work has been shown at festivals worldwide including Sundance, SXSW, New Directors/New Films, CPH:DOX and Visions du Réel, and has screened in partnership with museums such as the MOMA, BAMPFA and The Louvre. In 2018, Dosa was named to the inaugural class of DOCNYC's "40 under 40" and was also inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture's Documentary Branch. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a double major in sociology and anthropology, and has a joint masters in anthropology and international development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dosa lives and works in California.
