David MacDougall (born November 12, 1939) is an American-Australian visual anthropologist, academic, and documentary filmmaker, who is known for his ethnographic film work in Africa, Australia, Europe and India.

He was one of the first ethnographic filmmakers to eschew explanatory narration and employ longer takes, using subtitles to translate the speech of people in other cultures.

[5] His films have also explored what he has termed “social aesthetics,” the combination of manners, everyday rituals, textures, colors, architectural forms, and material objects that create the distinctive character of a community.

[1][12] MacDougall began his career in 1972 when he made his first film To Live with Herds about the semi-nomadic pastoral Jie people in Uganda.

[16] Lorang's Way, released in 1979, was a portrait of a senior man of the Turkana, and won the first prize at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979.

[23] The setting of the documentary was a shelter for abandoned, runaway, or orphaned children on the outskirts of New Delhi, where MacDougall lived for several months.

They studied the daily lives of the boys, the social aesthetics of the school, its rituals, traditions, material culture and language.

From 2011 to 2017 he directed the 6-year “Childhood and Modernity” project in India in which different groups of children conducted research in their own communities using video cameras.