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2026 Legacy Lecture to feature Leonard Kamerling

The ËÄ»¢Ó°Ôº 2026 Legacy Lecture will honor Leonard Kamerling at 7 p.m. Monday, June 1, in the auditorium at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

The annual Legacy Lecture, presented by UAF Summer Sessions and Lifelong Learning, celebrates UAF alumni who have made significant contributions to the community.

Kamerling, UAF professor of English and curator of film emeritus, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and ethnographer with more than 50 years of experience documenting Alaska Native and world cultures. A native New Yorker, he came to Alaska with the federal  Volunteers in Service to America program in the 1960s and made his first film, "People of Tununak," while living in the Southwest Alaska Yup'ik village.

Together with filmmaker Sarah Elder, Kamerling developed a style of ethnographic filmmaking that emphasized collaboration with the Alaska Native villagers who were the subjects of their films. Kamerling’s best-known film, "The Drums of Winter," is preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry, and 22 of his films have received international distribution.

Kamerling served as UAMN’s curator of film from 1990 to 2020. At UAF, he taught film writing, anthropological and ethnographic film production, and documentary journalism, and he received the College of Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005.

Kamerling’s work extends beyond Alaska to include films on Japanese culture and, in collaboration with Peter Biella, documentation of 30 years of Maasai family life in Tanzania. In 2018-19, he was named a Fulbright Scholar to the University of Tromsø in Norway, where he continues as a guest lecturer in visual anthropology.

The event, which will be followed by a reception, will be livestreamed on the events page. The talk will be recorded and posted on the web for those unable to attend.

For more information, visit the Summer Sessions events page, email summer@alaska.edu or call 907-474-7021.

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