Wild Witness

Lindsay Gilmour - Director / Producer

Lindsay is an educator, filmmaker, choreographer, and performer exploring the human body in relationship to place, and looking at the reciprocity between human consciousness and our planet through movement. Her work explores ancient forests, deserts, coastal wilderness, and remote nunneries and monasteries in the Himalayas. She is the recipient of a Nehru Fulbright Award (2018) and a Hellman Fellowship (2020-2021) in support of her research on the preservation, adaptation, and innovation of ritual dance in Vajrayana Buddhist nunneries and monasteries in India. She has practiced The Discipline of Authentic Movement since 2008.
 
Her films have screened nationally and internationally, at prestigious festivals including Dance Camera West, San Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Dance Camera Istanbul, In Shadow Lisbon, and the International Buddhist Film Festival, and at conferences including the American College Dance Conference, Body-Mind Centering Conference, and Cartographies of Movement Dance Studies Association Conference.

As a performer, she has toured nationally and internationally with Yin Mei Dance and with Pearson/Widrig Dance Theater.  Her stage works have been performed nationally and internationally, including at Judson Church and Dixon Place in New York city, at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and most recently at the historic Castillo San Cristóbal in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has been an Artist in Residence in Managua, Nicaragua, and in Santiago, Chile.  
 
Lindsay is an assistant professor of dance at the University of California Irvine, and a former assistant professor of dance at Ithaca College.  She received an MA in international studies with a focus in Tibetan studies at Columbia University, an MFA in performance and choreography at the University of Wisconsin, and a BFA in dance at the University of Montana.

She serves on the board of directors of Dongyu Gatsal Ling, a Vajrayana Buddhist nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India, and on the board of directors of Core of Culture, a non-profit organization dedicated to safeguarding ancient dance traditions and embodied spiritual practices. 
 
She is deeply interested in embodied knowledge and exploring what ancient dances share with contemporary somatic movement practices. ​

Nathan Whitmont - Cinematographer / Editor
​
Nathan Whitmont is a filmmaker, a mountaineer, an associate field director for the non-profit organization Core of Culture, which is dedicated to preserving ancient ritual dance in the Himalayas, and a professional hunting guide in remote regions of Alaska and Montana.  He is a former creative consultant at Ballet Society in New York City.
 
Over two decades, he has conducted research and film documentation projects in nearly a dozen Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist monasteries and nunneries in India and Nepal, primarily in the high-altitude kingdom of Ladakh, and primarily during winter, when the most authentic dances occur, and when temperatures can drop to negative 30 degrees centigrade.
 
Each year Nathan lives in tents in the wildernesses of Alaska and Montana for three to five months – often going sixty days without return to any civilization – and most years spends weeks or months in the Himalayas, once even living alongside a monk inside a monastery for several weeks during an annual dance ritual.  
 
He examines the profound importance of human connection with the natural world, and the wisdom of the body especially as accessed and expressed through movement.  He is fascinated by ancient art and mystical traditions.