Knud Fischer-Møller (coordinator)
Knud Fischer-Møller, anthropologist from the University of Copenhagen. He has been associated with NAFA since the early 1980s and has served repeatedly as a member of NAFA film selection committee, participated in a number of international seminars, conferences and film festivals concerning visual anthropology and ethnographic documentaries. The main focus of his research is on controlled transgression and performative anthropology concerning the mask-custom Twelfth Night; a public event, where the informal house-visits takes place on only one part of the island of Ærø in Denmark.
Karen Waltorp
Karen Waltorp is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is associate professor at Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, where she heads the Ethnographic Exploratory and Multimodal MediaLab, a physical and virtual space for multimodal experimentation across faculty, students, and guests, and coordinates the Researcher Group Technē. Waltorp received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Basil Wright Film Prize (2011) and Nordic Panorama New Nordic Voices Award (2011) for her debut documentary Manenberg (Waltorp & Vium, RAI 2010).
She is part of the Afghan-Danish ARTlife Film Collective, and was part of Cph:Dox Lab 2022-2023 with Diplomatic Rebel. Waltorp is the author of Why Muslim Women and Smartphones: Mirror Images (Routledge 2020) and co-editor of Energy Futures (de Gruyter 2022) and An Anthropology of Technologies and Futures (Routledge 2022). She is convener of the Future Anthropologies Network and Multimodal Anthropology Network under the European Association for Social Anthropologists, and she serves on the Editorial Boards of Cultural Anthropology and Visual Anthropology.
She was Co-PI on ARTlife (AUFF NOVA 2017-2020) and is currently PI on DigiSAt – Digital everyday lives far from Silicon Valley (DFF 2021-2024). She has been visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, 2016, Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT 2018, Emerging Technologies Lab, Monash University, 2020 and was visiting student researcher in 2005-06 at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town.
Anna Elisabeth Stub Thygesen.
Anna Stub Thygesen holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen and is currently studying a Nordic Master in Visual Studies and Art Education. Through multimodal approaches she explores and experiments with the interfaces and dialectics of human perception, emotion, and imagination.
She is the student curator of Ethnographic Exploratory, a virtual and physical space furthering collaborative and experimental research- and teaching activities at the Department of Anthropology – for students, researchers, and guests alike.
Werner Sperschneider
Werner Sperschneider received a PhD in Visual Anthropology from Aarhus University in 1998 for his film and thesis 100 Years Greenland on Film.
He holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from the GCVA (Manchester, 1989-90). For a decade he was affiliated to the Göttingen Institute for Scientific Film, where he was the director for the 1994 Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF). He made portrait films of respected anthropologists such as Sir Raymond Firth and Norwegian professor Fredrik Barth.
Later he worked as a participatory design user researcher (with video) in the industry. He’s today a researcher and project manager in the healthcare sector developing EdTech solutions for nursing curricular.
The Film Selection Committee
Catarina Alves Costa is a filmmaker and a visual anthropologist. She has been directing films since 1992, won various international prizes and published different works on documentary and ethnographic films. She is currently Professor in Visual Culture at the Department of Anthropology Nova University in Lisbon and a researcher at CRIA.
Linda Jonsen Engberg has an MA in Visual Anthropology from GCVA (Manchester), where she was a student in the years 1990-91. Her film (with thesis) is called Camping or call it what you like. She also has a Mag. Art. in Social Anthropology from Aarhus University 1997.
Linda has been actively involved in NAFA since the 1980s and has, for example, co-organised several NAFA festivals. She was responsible for the NAFA film archive in Aarhus until she helped transfer it to Oslo. Since 2004 she has been working as a teacher in the Danish public school system, mostly with children with special needs.
Dipesh Kharel is an anthropologist and filmmaker. He currently holds the position of visiting researcher and lecturer at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. Dipesh teaches visual anthropology, specifically creative use of camera and audio recording as research tools for scientific research in cutting-edge topics and diverse disciplines, including Artificial Intelligence (AI).
His extensive fieldwork has yielded valuable data, resulting in scholarly manuscripts and multiple award-winning ethnographic documentary films. Notable among his filmography are the critically acclaimed works A Life with Slate (2006), Playing with Nan (2012), Tama Gaun (2015), and Japani (2020). Dipesh’s outstanding contributions to the field have been recognized with a prestigious prize from Oxford University Press in 2016 for his exceptional journal article. Presently, Dipesh is engaged in a research project focused on studying the experiences of new immigrants in Japan. For inquiries, please contact him at khareldipesh2036@gmail.com
Len Kamerling is an ethnographic filmmaker and educator. He has made more than a dozen films about Indigenous cultures and issues, and pioneered a community collaborative approach that is the foundation of all his work. Throughout his career he has been concerned with cultural representation and the role that ethnographic film can play in eliminating stereotypes and communicating one culture to another. Len is Emeritus Professor and Curator of Film at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Ieva Laucina has a background in cultural studies and photography and is often found exploring mountains. She studied visual anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and her master film, Holding Space, shot in Aotearoa New Zealand, has been shown at a number of film festivals, including the 41st NAFA festival held in Romania.
Peter I. Crawford is an anthropologist, publisher and filmmaker. He is professor of Visual Anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and teaches at the international master programme of visual anthropology (MVA). He is publishing editor of Intervention Press (www.intervention.dk) and on the editorial board of the international journal AnthroVision. He is general secretary of NAFA and has been the chairman of the NAFA international film selection committee for many years.
The film screening programme has been edited and compiled by Peter I. Crawford (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway).