Team
Core staff
My interests are between art, science and anthropology using sound art, documentary and landscape film for public engagement. My research has been in Japan (since 1992) on the Zen Arts, copying culture and the political ecology of US military bases, and since 2019 on the sonic biodiversity and aesthetics in Colombia and France.
My research interests include hunting, perception, the senses, visual anthropology, sound, phenomenology and embodiment. I worked on donso hunters in Burkina Faso, West Africa, looking at their relationship with a changing environment and embodied knowledge. I make documentary films, photography and sound recordings.
My regional specialisations are Kampala, Uganda and New York, USA. I do research on experiences of illness, death and dying (especially from HIV/AIDS), in relation to the aesthetic appreciation of time, existence, and otherness; I am also interested in phenomenology, art, performance and creativity, time, comparisons of personhood, religious change, gender and urban experiences.
I am a digital and visual anthropologist, with thematic areas in intergenerational mobilities, work and gender. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Trinidad, Nepal, Australia and Cambodia and my current research focuses on the Everest tourism industry and includes a photographic study of development, environmental and social change.
My area of studies ranges from indigenous politics, through transnational migration to postcoloniality (Brazil, Portugal). The research project I’m currently developing, Emerging Urban Convivialities, brings together my previous work with middle-class migration and a recent interest in processes of neo-liberal urban renewal and gentrification.
I am a visual anthropologist and an artist who is interested in creatively bringing those two fields together. I have done research in the Himalayas, the south Pacific, and with First Nations in the US around issues of media use and visual sovereignty, senses of place, and the potential for visual anthropology to address ecological concerns. I publish on anthropology and contemporary art and focus on encouraging anthropologists to explore a wide range of experimental and collaborative practices.
I am a short fiction writer/director focusing on comedy and horror. I have been a first assistant director for several BBC and BFI funded shorts and a BBC New Creatives & BFI Creative Producer Lab participant. I have 10 years’ experience working in film and AV support, education and learning content creation, and film skill sessions.
GCVA affiliates
I am a Drag performer, visual artist and academic. My doctoral work in anthropology focused on the spatial multiplicity of contemporary urban gay villages and incorporated the use of graphic novella as a form of ethnographic storytelling. I am working on the project Co-Creative MiND: The Inner Lifeworlds of MND.
I am a visual anthropologist, documentary film director and community arts facilitator with a particular focus on creative practices adopted from Theatre of the Oppressed, PhotoVoice and Participatory Video. I worked on experiences of illegal crossings in the Mediterranean combining theatre, storytelling, photography, documentary filmmaking and animation as co-creative research methods with a group of Egyptian men. I am particularly interested in exploring the existential spaces between imagination, memory and experience in the context of migration and critical events.
My current research project, The Silent Time Machine, funded through a Leverhulme Major Fellowship, is an investigation of ethnographic film prior to portable synchronous sound. Longer standing interests include the work of Jean Rouch (presented in The Adventure of the Real, Chicago 2009), the ethics of documentary film-making and the classical ethnology of indigenous Amazonia. I am also engaged in a long term film-making project about memory and landscape in rural Tuscany.
Since 1992 I have worked as a director and cameraman for documentaries on British TV, including the BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winning series Welcome to Lagos, Tribe and Meet the Natives for BBC and Channel 4. At the GCVA I transmit to students my experience in production to help them translate their skills into employability.
I specialise in screen practice as research, including ethnofiction, docufiction and participatory video. My approach, which I developed through film and theatre education, and freelance work as an actor and filmmaker, revolves around the boundaries between artistic and academic forms of representation.
My research interest and sound art practice focuses on soundscape, perception and expectation, sound design, field recording, sound preservation and immersive audio. My interest lies in sonic storytelling around soundscapes of isolation, infrastructure, decay and liminal edgelands spaces. I specialise in spatial field recording and building and designing immersive soundscape simulators, which have been used on a number of large scale EPRSC projects.