Silhouette of person viewing green and yellow terraced rice fields made of earth and plants
Talk / Lecture

Exhibition Walk-through: Mountain Spirits

November 12, 2026 | 1:00PM - 2:00PM

IN PERSON

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Spirits, will lead a gallery walk-through of this exhibition and discuss the research, collaborations, and curatorial process behind the show. They will address how objects, landscapes, video, and ancestral knowledge shed light on the enduring connections between Ifugao communities, rice, and land.

Paul Connor, director of video experience for Mountain Spirits, works with UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences on media production and research projects involving film and video. He has led the redesign of divisional websites, launched YouTube channels, and developed marketing campaigns for new academic programs. Connor also served as digital lab director for the groundbreaking Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), which collected more than 1,600 hours of video data documenting the lives of 32 middle-income families in Los Angeles. With a background in film production, he has written and directed narrative films that have received audience awards and screened at Oscar-qualifying film festivals.

Amy Landau, co-curator of Mountain Spirits, is director of education and interpretation at the Fowler Museum, where she oversees gallery interpretation, digital learning, and programming for K–12 audiences, university students, and the public. Previously, she served as curator of Islamic and South & Southeast Asian art (2009–19) and director of curatorial affairs (2016–19) at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Her work there included organizing award-winning exhibitions, overseeing major gallery reinstallations of Asian art in the museum’s historic townhouse, and contributing to a landmark digitization project of one of North America’s most significant manuscript collections. In 2018, Landau co-founded Art, Religion and Cities at Morgan State University’s Center for Religion and Cities, an initiative dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research and teaching at the intersection of urban life, art, and belief.

Photos by Angel Xotlanihua

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