Dr. Michael Yorke

Michael is an anthropologist, photographer and documentary filmmaker. His passion is to inspire the indigenous voice.  Indigenous tribal people around the world are best able to explain and express their own beliefs and way-of-life. 

Michael was born in Cambridge in 1944.  His bid for independence, after leaving school, was travelling overland to India in 1962.  In Kathmandu he bought a Minolta camera from a bankrupt hippy.  His involvement in photography has never waned. Back in Britain he was determined to get to grips with the culture of South Asia and studied Anthropology at Edinburgh University. Subsequently he became a Ph.D. student under Prof. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Prof. Adrian Mayer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.  In 1972-74 he returned to India to research among the Ho adivasi tribals in Jharkhand.  There he made his first film ‘The Ho: People Of The Rice Pot‘.  In 1977 he went back to India with Prof. Haimendorf for postdoctoral research among the Raj Gond ‘adivasi‘ tribals of Telangana for 18 months.

Michael as a child with his father in1949

Michael’s fascination with film and anthropology led him to make his film on the Ho, People of the Rice Pot, on the grounds that film allows the viewer to have a deeper understanding of the indigenous tribal way-of-life than a written document. Its success led him to join the BBC Ethnographic Film Unit where he directed a number of films in India and around the world. From 2000 he went freelance and directed live-event, presenter-driven, observational, fly-on-the-wall, and authored ethnographic films for Channel Four, National Geographic, NHK, CNN, ZDF, Carlton TV, Canal Plus, Discovery Channel, and TeleImage.

During his career Michael’s  films have won international awards; the Earthwatch Award, the Golden Gate Award, the Royal Television Society Award, and the BBC Asia Award. He was nominated for a BAFTA (British Association of Film and Television Arts) award. His films have been screened at the RAI Film Festival, the Trento Film Festival, the Moscow University Film Festival, Taiwan Film Festival and many others. He also shot and edited his own film with a Juna Akhara sadhu in the Himalayas, and for the Adivasi Arts Trust.

In 2007-11 he was a senior Fellow at University College London, Anthropology Department, teaching filmmaking as an ethnographic research methodology to post graduate students.

Dr. Yorke is on the board of the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Committee, and chairs the Adivasi Arts Trust (click here to know more about AAT). He has judged the RAI Film Festival, The Rory Peck Festival, and the Astra Film Festival (Rumania). He takes great pleasure in mentoring young filmmakers.

He is married with two children, lives in London, and is retired.