Donagh Coleman holds degrees in philosophy and psychology (BA) and in music and media technologies (MPhil) from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Asian studies from UC Berkeley.  He is currently a PhD candidate in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley where his dissertation research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist tukdam deaths and their Tibetan and scientific figurations.  Donagh was a 2022 Dissertation Fellow at the ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.  He has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and made award-winning films with wide international festival and TV exposure like Tukdam: Between Worlds (2022), A Gesar Bard’s Tale (2013), and Stone Pastures (2008).  Donagh’s films have also been shown at museums such as MoMA and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and by the European Commission.

In the state of tukdam, the bodies of meditators do not show usual signs of death for days or even weeks after clinical death.  According to Tibetan Buddhists, the practitioners are resting in a subtle state of consciousness and are still in the process of dying.  Donagh’s Fulbright-Hays project is juxtaposing Tibetan and biomedical understandings of death and tukdam, with a particular focus on a scientific study of tukdam in Tibetan settlements in India.  He is looking at issues of incommensurability between Indo-Tibetan and scientific views, related questions of consciousness, and the cultural power that science may exert over Tibetan Buddhist knowledge and its formulations in this context.