Team
Lana is a visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker interested in political anthropology, future planning, uncertainty, migration, Sufism and policy. Her fieldwork focuses on the Kurdistan region in the Middle East.
After studying international relations and political science at University College Utrecht (BA) and anthropology at Cambridge University (MPhil), she was trained in documentary filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (MA). She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester (2018).
As part of her research, Lana has produced the following short documentary films:
- Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing (2014)
- Future Factory (2018)
- Bridge to Kobane (2019)
- Bury me Here (2021)
Ildikó studied anthropology and cultural studies in Romania and Hungary, later graduating in Visual Ethnography at Leiden University with her film Swamp Dialogues (2015).
In her PhD research, she turned towards vision as a technology that produces phenotypic and racial differences and explored multimodal publishing formats by intertwining experimental film clips with written arguments (see Interfaces, 2021).
In her current research, Ildikó is interested in the politics of computer vision technologies as they travel from computer science labs to various deployment sites. As part of this research, she is currently editing her second feature-length film about image recognition algorithms, in which she expands vision by ethnographically attending to its relationality and human-machine entanglements.
- The Market (2013)
- Swamp Dialogues (2015)
- Anatomy of Anger: a manifesto (2020)
- Interfaces (2021)
Martha is a visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker interested in the politics and poetics of recovery after armed conflicts and environmental destruction.
Her research examines the transformative potentials of transitional justice processes and the work of memory in remaking a civil contract between people, environments and the state. She holds a Mag.ᵃ in Social Anthropology from the University of Vienna (2006), an MA in Visual Anthropology and Sensory Media (2008) and a PhD in Social Anthropology (2015) from the University of Manchester. After a six-year post-doc at the University of Bern, she joined the University of Amsterdam as an assistant Professor and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF).
Her current project, “Memory Futures: Truth, Justice and Virtual Reality,” is an ethnographic exploration of VR’s potential as a collaborative tool to approximate and share notions of truth and justice in transitional societies through the lens of critical empiricism, a philosophical approach that emphasises knowledge derived from sensory experience, observation, and experimentation.
- Take Me to a Place Outside (2009)
- Between Memories (2015)
- No Queremos! (2017)
- Horror in the Andes. Ayacuchean Cinema In-the-making (2023)
- How to See in the Dark? (forthcoming 2025)
Mattijs is a filmmaker and anthropologist. He did research in Serbia, Portugal, the Netherlands and, since 2001, in Bahia, Brazil.
His work keeps returning to realms of transgression – ecstatic religion, violence, eroticism and aesthetics – where humans face the fact that the world does not necessarily comply with their narrations of it.
Van de Port is the author of three monographs and has published widely in both anthropological and literary journals. He moved to filmmaking in 2013 when he made Saborear Frutas Brasileiras, about the joy of eating fruits.
Enchanted by the affordances of camera-based research and exploring how the genre of the essay film can intervene in ongoing conversations in anthropology, he made the following films:
- Saborear Frutas Brasileiras (2013)
- The Possibility of Spirits (2017)
- Knots and Holes. An essay film on the life of nets (2018)
- The Body Won’t Close. Bahian Tales of Danger and Vulnerability (2020)
- Where can I get lost? (2024)
Jorge is a multimodal and multispecies anthropologist. He writes and makes films at the intersections of political, economic, environmental, and media anthropology. His geographical areas of specialization are Latin America and Southern Europe. At the UvA, he is an Assistant Professor and a member of the AISSR Moving Matters research group. He is also a co-founder of Kaleidos – a center for interdisciplinary ethnography at the University of Cuenca in Ecuador. At Kaleidos, he co-directs two multimodal platforms: EthnoData and Prison Observatory 593.
His filmmaking work includes producing the documentary El Comité: La Toma del Penal García Moreno (2005), which follows a group of inmates as they took over Ecuador’s oldest maximum-security prison in Quito in a revolt against latent corruption and institutional abuses. In 2014, he wrote the script and conducted ethnographic and archival research for a second documentary, El Panóptico Ciego, which was made during the decommissioning of the same prison, documenting the effort to rescue its extensive archive – one of the largest prison archives in Latin America.