Executive Director
Documentary Educational Resources →

alice@der.org

Alice is an anthropologist and filmmaker who studied anthropological representations of the Kalahari Bushmen (including the Ju/’hoansi) as part of her graduate studies at NYU. Remembering John Marshall which premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as part of a tribute to John Marshall, is Alice’s first film. Subsequent video work includes a series of museum project profiles for the Institute for Museum and Library Services and a film about the medical researcher, David Hamilton Smith, who developed the first vaccine effective against spinal meningitis.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Brandeis University →

palvarez@brandeis.edu

Ethnography, critical theory, sensory ethnography, and the documentary arts. Her most recent works converge on issues of gender and ethnic representations in neoliberal, post-authoritarian Peru.

Professor of Media Design Practices
Website →

chin.elizabethj@gmail.com

Elizabeth is a Professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA teaching in the MFA program Media Design Practices. Her work spans a variety of topics–race, consumption, Barbie–but nearly always engages marginalized youth in collaboratively taking on the complexities of the world around them. She has current projects in Los Angeles, Uganda, and Haiti and have engaged partners including the Los Angeles Police Department, numerous public schools, Jovenes, Inc. in Boyle Heights, and Lekòl Kominotè Matènwa in Haiti.

Social Anthropologist and Ethnographic Filmmaker

cool@usc.edu

Jenny Cool is a social anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker whose work focuses on cultural production and reproduction in the U.S. and on dominant social imaginaries, such as the American dream of homeownership and the narrative of social revolution through technology. The first is the subject of her film Home Economics: a documentary of suburbia, which premiered nationally on the PBS Television series POV in 1995. The second is the focus of herc current work on the ethnography and cultural history of networked social media. Internet culture and social media, popular culture, feminist social theory, business anthropology, film production.

Please contact me through email first, include “SVA Mentor” in the subject heading. Review of any photos or video, please send link to them (no attachments). I will respond as soon as possible.

Associate Professor
Behavioral and Social Science, College of Medicine, University of Houston →

jcrowder@uh.edu

Jerome is a visual ethnographer and medical anthropologist working in a medical school setting. His research combines issues of migration and urbanization with medical decision-making strategies and ideas of community. His photo exhibit, “Sueños Urbanos/Urban Dreams: The Search for a Better Life in Bolivia” has toured museums in both North and South America. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Puno, Perú (2003) and worked (2013-2018) with neighborhoods on Galveston Island to better understand their conceptions of access to the medical system in the USA (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research) of which he has used both still photo and video in the research.

Savannah College of Art and Design →

falls.susan@gmail.com

Susan Falls, PhD is a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design. She is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the intersection of material culture, semiotics and political economy.

Northwestern University →

sshankar@northwestern.edu

Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology, race & ethnicity, diaspora and migration, youth, media, advertising, semiotics, South Asian diaspora, Asian diasporas, United States. Joint appointment with Asian American Studies.

University of Pennsylvania →

Deborah.Thomas@sas.upenn.edu

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research areas focus on power, race, violence, imperialism, social justice and gender.

University of Central Florida →

Natalie.Underberg-Goode@ucf.edu

Natalie Underberg-Goode is Professor of Digital Media and Folklore and Assistant Director, Games and Interactive Media, in the UCF Nicholson School of Communication and Media. Her research examines the use of digital media to preserve and disseminate folklore and cultural heritage, with a focus on digital storytelling and participatory new media design and practice. She is author (with Elayne Zorn) of the book Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media (University of Texas Press, 2013), editor of a special issue of the international journal Visual Ethnography on Exploring Digital Ethnography through Embodied Perspective, Role-Playing and Community Participation and Design, and author of more than two dozen peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings on topics related to digital storytelling and digital heritage. Her most current project is Portal to Peru, funded by a Department of Education grant received by the UCF Latin American Studies program where she is affiliated faculty.