Lucas Bessire is an American writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. Ethnographic fieldwork has taken him across the Americas, from lowland South America to Arctic Alaska and back to the High Plains where he was raised. A fifth-generation Kansan, Bessire has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among others. Currently a Professor of Anthropology at the Colorado School of Mines, he is the author of the award-winning books Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press, 2021). Additional writings have appeared in various journals and magazines. Bessire is preparing new work that examines major social and environmental shifts underway across the High Plains and the Alaskan Arctic.