About

Founded in 2005 by filmmakers Chris Arnold and Augusta Palmer, Cultural Animal is a Brooklyn-based production company that makes films which foreground the centrality of culture in all human experience. Culture – which we define as the intersection of language, art, popular media, and public ritual – is the lens through which we perceive our world. Whether the cultural context for a film is a Brooklyn neighborhood, a Manhattan library, a Memphis stage or a Moroccan village, we believe that all humans are cultural animals and that all moving images are culturally coded. Therefore, we strive to create fiction and nonfiction content whose visual beauty is matched by a conceptual structure that exposes, complements, or questions the cultural context.

Augusta Palmer

Augusta Palmer is a filmmaker and scholar who makes music documentaries that unspool their stories from the bottom up, using music as a critical path to the heart of history and culture. Her debut feature, The Hand of Fatima (2009), about Robert Palmer and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, premiered at London’s Raindance Film Festival and was a New York Magazine Critic’s Pick during its theatrical run. Her fiction short, “A is for Aye-Aye: An Abecedarian Adventure” (2015) is a love letter to the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection that screened in festivals from New York to New Zealand. She is currently at work on The Blues Society, a documentary about the Memphis Country Blues Festivals of the 1960s. Palmer earned her Ph. D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. She is an Associate Professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY.

Chris Arnold

Chris directed, shot, edited and produced If You Succeed and served as producer and editor on The Hand of Fatima (see FEATURES). He is currently focusing on fiction, finishing an MFA in Film in the Stony Brook University / Killer Films program. Check out his first feature screenplay here. Chris worked at Manhattan’s DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center) for two decades as an editor, media educator, program director, Head of Post Production and finally as Technical Director. Chris currently works as an adjunct lecturer at Stony Brook and St. Francis College and is seeking a full-time, tenure track position.