Ted Nemeth became well-known in the 1950s and 1960s as an avant-garde experimental film-maker, but he combined this with working for television on entirely conventional entertainment shows and animation projects, such asThe Muppets.
Earlier in his career, he also made commercials and documentaries and it was during this phase that in 1941, he worked with Penn Museum, editing two films from the footage brought back by the 1931 expedition to the Mato Grosso in Brazil which produced the travelogue feature film, Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness.
One of these two films concerned the indigenous peoples of the upper Xingu, while the other concerned the Bororo.