Todd McGrain
Arts/Industry: Foundry, 1995, 1997
Todd McGrain is the cofounder and art director of Lost Bird. After a twenty-five-year career as a sculptor, he turned his attention to documentary filmmaking.
McGrain’s accomplishments as a sculptor include the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Audubon Award for Art Inspiring Conservation. His sculptures are part of several major museum collections in the United States and abroad.
In 2010, McGrain’s work to create permanent public memorials to birds driven to extinction in modern times became the subject of the documentary The Lost Bird Project produced by Middlemarch Films. This rewarding experience led McGrain to his current pursuit, documenting the plight of the forest elephants of Central Africa. Though Elephant Path / Njaia Njoku is McGrain’s first feature length documentary, his understanding of the value of storytelling to raise awareness of our current extinction crisis has been formed over decades of dedication and commitment.
He earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
