John M. Bishop

From 1978 to 1985 Alan Lomax traveled the American South and Southwest with a television crew to document regional folklore with deep historical roots. From the resulting 400 hours of footage came the five-program series American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991.

An exploration of the musical and social origins of the blues, shot on location in Mississippi in 1978 by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in association with the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television and broadcast on PBS in 1980. This re-release in 2009 includes two hours of additional music.

Several filmmakers discuss the introduction of Western modes of communication, especially film, to native cultures. While these tools can help a native people to document their own culture, it can also "swallow" their culture, encroaching upon and irreversibly altering it. The film takes its title from a book written by filmmaker Edmund Carpenter in 1972 about his engagement with media in Papua New Guinea.

A documentary about Jewish-American identity.

In The Wilderness Of A Troubled Genre is a conversation over time and space with ethnographic and actuality filmmakers recorded 2000-2012. The film considers the ethos, practicalities, practices, and ethics of making films about real people across cultures. It includes pioneers in the field like Robert Gardner, John Marshall, David MacDougall, and Richard Leacock; established filmmaker anthropologists such as Paul Henley, Sarah Elder, Rolf Husmann, Metje Postma, and Michael Yorke; as well as emerging filmmakers. Shot and edited by John Bishop, this is a spirited engagement with a film-making practice that continues evolving and challenging filmmakers today.