As a painting and printmaking major, Melissa Lesh (BFA 13) spent her days painting scenes from wildlife. But come summer, she’d pack up her brushes and canvases, and set out for remote refuges like Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp and the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge in Maine, where she worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She was living dual lives—one as an artist and one as a wildlife conservationist. Eventually she thought to herself, “I’ve got to figure out how to combine this.”
Lesh found that combination in an unexpected place: a documentary film class she signed up for as an elective. In the course, she teamed up with Anne Wright from the VCU Department of Biology and the university’s Rice Rivers Center to produce a film documenting Atlantic sturgeon.
“I heard the sturgeon were spawning in the James River,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is amazing. Why isn’t anyone filming this?’”
The film turned into a series Lesh and Wright called “Science in the Park.” Lesh filmed the flora and fauna found around the city—the ecosystems in our own backyards.
She soon realized that documentary filmmaking allowed her to explore conservation in a way that painting couldn’t.
“I realized that painting wasn’t the most effective way for me to convey what I wanted to convey, or to work on what I wanted to work on,” she says. “Film seemed to be the perfect medium because I could be out in these places and talking to real scientists and working with animals.”
Since those pieces came together, Lesh has worked on a number of films focusing on conservation, natural history and sustainability. Her first documentary featured India’s first private wildlife sanctuary and the people working to protect it. She and her partner, Trevor Frost, have also worked on a few projects for National Geographic, including a story on crocodiles and filming gelada monkeys in Ethiopia.
Lesh says coming from an arts background has given her a different perspective in a field often dominated by scientists.
“A lot of scientists go into photography because they’re doing research and realize they need to communicate to the public,” she says. “For me, it was the opposite. But as a storyteller, it’s good to not be an expert. Coming from a place of non-understanding is a good way to break down in-depth science.”
For one of her most recent projects, Lesh helped distill nearly 10 years of scientific research—and 14 terabytes of video footage from researchers, field assistants and photographers—into a 17-minute film. “Person of the Forest” captures orangutan cultural behaviors and their similarities to human culture.
The film was selected for the Mountainfilm festival in Telluride in 2017. Lesh is now making her way through the festival circuit, with stops in D.C., Richmond, San Francisco, the Yale Environmental Film Festival and more. On Earth Day 2018, Vimeo featured “Person of the Forest” as a Staff Pick.
Lesh hopes the film will raise awareness about the human link to orangutans and help viewers understand how deforestation continues to threaten the critically endangered species—and maybe they’ll begin to look at the impact of their own behaviors.
“The second you bring people into the lives of animals that are so similar and so intelligent and so complex, that gives them the opportunity to connect in ways that text and research don’t,” Lesh says.
“If I can tell a good story, it doesn’t feel like you’re being told or taught. It just feels like you’re being pulled through this experience and you come out feeling moved to do something, to live in a different way.”
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