Topography
A multi-format documentary project exploring the histories and futures of land use.
- Period
- 2021–present
- Status
- Active / Ongoing
- Form
- Multi-format documentary project
The project
Topography is an ongoing multi-format documentary project that includes films, live-edited performances, interactive experiences, and community collaborations. Set in and around America’s public lands, the project spends time in the Badlands, Death Valley, Fire Island, and Zion. Paleontologists, medicinal plant experts, rangers, ranchers, motel workers, and tourists describe land at different scales and from different positions. Across these forms, Topography fragments across time, species, scales, and histories to reveal how different perspectives shape the land and its futures.
We aspire to apply the most appropriate form to each subject. Hannah and I spend time with people, landscapes, archives, images and sounds, then ask what form the material needs. A film can follow someone over years. A live performance can recombine images and voices in front of an audience. An installation can let visitors move through a scanned place. Sometimes one subject needs several approaches, so the forms produce material for one another.
Supported by
- Residency2025
- Funder2024
- Funder2022
- Residency2022
- Funder2022
- Funder2022
- Residency2025
- Funder2024
- Residency2021–2022
- Funder
- Funder2024, 2025
- Residency2024
- Fiscal SponsorOngoing
- Fiscal SponsorNovember 2023–August 2026
- Funder2025
- Residency2025
- Funder2024
- Funder
Supported by the New York State Council on the Arts through UnionDocs
2024 - Funder2024
- Funder2024
- Funder2024
- Funder2023
- Presenter2023
- Funder2023
- Funder2023
- Funder2023
- Residency2022
- Funder2022
- Residency2018
- Institutional Support
- Institutional Support
- Institutional Support
Selected credits
- Alexander Porter
- Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
- Hannah Jayanti
- Director / Producer / Cinematographer / Editor / Sound
- Keith Wilson
- Documentary Producer
- Katayoun Dibamehr
- Immersive Co-Producer
- Richard T. Sherman
- Consulting Producer
- Delfina Vincenti
- Associate Producer
- Juan Pedro Agurcia
- Associate Producer
- Michele Graffieti
- Designer
- Jacob Burke
- Game Developer
- Linus Gruszewski
- Architect
Links & presentations
- Sundance Institute · 2024Sandbox Fund, Grant↗
- Science and Justice Research Center, UC Santa Cruz · 2024Strata Live Performance↗
- Camden International Film Festival · 2023Strata: A Performance of Topography | Storyforms↗
- Camden International Film Festival · 2023Between Vérité and Landscape Cinema↗
- Onassis Plásmata Festival II x Movement Radio · 2023Onassis Plásmata Festival | Live Performance↗
- Transmediale · 2023Transmediale | Live Performance↗






