Chase A. Niesner
About
Chase A. Niesner is an anthropologist, writer and filmmaker with an interest in multi-species relations, media praxis, the politics of belonging, and the history of science. Previously he was the filmmaking instructor at Art Division in Los Angeles. He lives between Berkeley CA, and Santa Fe NM.
UC Berkeley (2025—present), Postdoctoral Fellow, Echeverri Lab at ESPM
UCLA (2018—2023), PhD, IOES
Yale University (2009—2013), B.A., History
Writing
Camera Trap Poetics (Edge Effects, 2026)
The Coyote in the Cloud (Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2024)
Urban Biodiversity and the Importance of Scale (Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2021)
Multimedia
Signs of Life, Part 1: The Santa Monica Mountains (ATTOM, Los Angeles, 2023)
How to See Coyotes, (The Labyrinth Project podcast, Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA, 2022)
Life, Death and Coyotes at Evergreen Cemetery (KCET, 2018)
Presentations
2025: Coyote Plays Itself: Play, performance, and the moving image in the Los Angeles ‘Ecology of Selves”(for the Berkeley Wildlife Spring Seminar Series, ESPM, Berkeley)
2024:An Ecology of Practices (or How to Live Together):The Relationship Between Conservation and Contemplation (for “Biodiversity Protection - Forecasting Success and Reversing Challenges in a Complex Socio-economic-ecological World,” SFI, Santa Fe).
2024: Readings from the Ponder Soda Pamphlet, Volume 1 (for “What does it mean to live (well) without human exceptionalism?,” a meeting of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research, Santa Fe).
2023: Coyote Trouble Los Angeles: Ways of Unsettling the Commons Through Coyote Eyes (for the panel “Multispecies Encounters in the Urban Commons” at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), Portland).
2023: The Curious Constraints of ‘Hazing’ Coyotes: Thinking with Urban Coyotes Towards Multispecies Justice,” for the “human-wildlife conflict” program at the International Urban Wildlife Conference (IUWC), Washington D.C.).
2022: Wildlife Affordances of Urban Infrastructure: A Framework to Understand Human-Animal Space Use in an “Ecology of Selves” (for the May CAP LTER workshop SEEP: Integrating Society, Ecology, Evolution and Plasticity).
Museum Exhibitions
Artist, Inside the Mask exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles