Dr. Alison Kahn (Director)
BA (Hons), MA (London), MPhil (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon) Fellow HEA
Dr. Alison Kahn was trained as an anthropologist at the universities of London (MA) and Oxford (MPhil, DPhil).
She is Director of the Oxford Documentary Film Institute, which specialises in workshops on factual filmmaking and emerging digital methods as tools for research. She is a research and tutorial fellow in Museum Anthropology and Modernist Literature at Stanford University Overseas Program in Oxford.
She is an artist and Teaching Fellow on Stanford University’s Oxford undergraduate program where she lectures on museum anthropology and digital technologies. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in AI and Design Anthropology at Loughborough University.
Alison has pioneered digitising film archives in ethnographic museums and is an award-winning filmmaker. She uses collaborative and participatory ethnographic approaches in her fieldwork. Her most recent documentary, We, the Zeme (2022), celebrated the first Zeme Naga Olympics in Nagaland and confronted the trauma of separated communities and her current research, Digital Children- Who are they? investigates how children engage with multimedia activities, including: filmmaking, music, and online learning platforms.
She works in both the media industry and in academia, lecturing on ethnographic filmmaking and museum anthropology. Her area of study includes material culture and colonial and post-colonial discourses in India, focusing on Naga representation in European museums and Anglo-Indian global diasporas.
Her research portfolio spans across material culture studies, visual, digital, and museum anthropology. Her recent projects experimenting with digital media formats have included non-linear storytelling with ebooks, interactive documentaries, VR and AR technologies.
She has worked as a director and producer on several documentaries including her own commissioned 3-part documentary film series for Discovery Channel. She produced and directed Captured by Women (2011) – a one-hour documentary in four parts that focuses on film footage made by two British women in the 1930: Beatrice Blackwood in Papua New Guinea and Ursula Graham Bower in Manipur, India, This film was made in collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum, and with the help of a grant from UK Film Council via Screen South.
Ursula Graham Bower and Beatrice Blackwood were celebrated at the Intrepid Women exhibition at the University of Oxford. https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/intrepid-women
Alison is a member of the Mental Health and Aesthetics Research Group at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, the Public Health Film Society, UK, and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
Alexander Goldberg (Photograph Journalist)
Alexander Goldberg is the CEO of Image Asset Management & World History Archive, a global licensing company for Art & History images. He has distribution agents in China, India, Russia, USA, and twenty additional countries. He was a key member of the Heritage Image PartnershipEstablished HIP, a collaboration of image archives from 24 cultural collections and museums (including the British Museum, UNESCO and the British Library).Working in support of several educational publishers (US & UK based) including: Cengage (EMEA), Bonnier, Scholastic and Nelson Thorne’s, he has worked in Anglo-Canadian consultancy, offering research services for media users and publishers. (Text, images, video and audio). We are looking forward to learning from him about the image publishing indunstry. He will be taking us though our paces to discover how to use the commercial photography archive, pitfalls and advantages of the world of buying and selling photographs as well as information on copyright and media laws.
Dr. Maarten Roos (Filmmaker and Planetary Scientist)
MA (Univ. of Leiden, the Netherlands & Univ. of Paris 7), DPhil (Univ. of Paris 6)
Maarten is an all-round independent factual filmmaker and planetary scientist. He is passionate about and specialized in factual and educational productions on science & technology, music & art. He has made films for institutions such as European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency and the Paris Observatory, the VU medical centre in Amsterdam, and collaborated on a Discovery Channel Canada production about Mars exploration. In 2011 was commissioned to make a science documentary for Portuguese national TV channel RTP2, which was aired in 2012 (Between Mars and Svalbard). He made several independent documentaries, one of which was broadcast several times in the Netherlands (Spiral Galaxy, 2009). Other films have won awards at festival, such as Living the Tradition,which won the Best Documentary Feature award at the Erie International Film Festival in 2014 and The Venus Twilight Experiment, which won the award for Best Photography at the the BICC Bienial Internacional de Cine Científico in November 2016 in Ronda, Andalusia, Spain in 2016.
Apart from film related work he is doing a research project about the effectiveness of scientific videos on the internet.
Learn more about his work at his website Lightcurve Films. Digital Media Production (Oxford Brookes University)
Oxford Documentary Film Institute 