Nilo Merino Recalde

01 Cultural evolution research

02 Open-source scientific software

03 Data visualisation & design

04 Documentary cinematography

Scroll

↓

Visual Work

View project

Cinematographer

Awaken

Cinematography for Tom Lowe's feature documentary, following the last Tsaatan reindeer herders through the mountains of northern Mongolia.

Mongolia Tsaatan reindeer herders — Awaken

View project

Researcher

Cultural evolution of bird song

Studying how song culture evolves in wild great tit populations. 950,000+ notes analysed across generations using custom ML pipelines.

Oxford Wytham Woods, field research

View project

Camera Operator

Voyage of Time

Camera operator on Terrence Malick's Voyage of Time. Shot across four continents over three years.

On set Northern Mongolia, 2014

View project

Founder

sedum.studio

Data visualisation and consulting studio. Transforming complex scientific datasets into clear, compelling visual narratives.

Doñana Little egret

01 / 04

I study how culture evolves in nature, build open-source tools for science, and design data visualisations. Before academia, I spent five years as a documentary cinematographer — shooting for Terrence Malick and Tom Lowe across four continents.

Selected

Cultural evolution of bird song Researcher University of Oxford 2020–present

pykanto Creator Open source 2023 ↗

sedum.studio Founder Data viz & consulting 2024 ↗

Voyage of Time Cinematographer Terrence Malick 2016 ↗

Awaken Camera Tom Lowe 2018 ↗

Get in touch

nilo.recalde@biology.ox.ac.uk

Available for consulting, research collaborations, and visualisation projects.