Robert Y. Chang

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.

Education

• PhD New York University
• B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz

Companies

• Coordinating Producer, America ReFramed American Documentary, Inc. (2019)
• Associate Producer, America ReFramed American Documentary Inc. (2017 — 2019)
• Visiting Assistant Professor Fordham University (2015 — 2017)
• Lecturer New York University (2013 — 2014)
• Course Preceptor Princeton University (2010 — 2011)
• Visiting Scholar University of British Columbia (2008 — 2009)
• Director Nothing to Lose (2005 — 2006)