ODFI Team

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 Visiting Fellow in Digital Learning Systems at SSEHS, Loughborough University, and Director of a Cultural Heritage, Education and AI Think Tank for a digital archive management company( SDS-Group).

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. A couple of her current projects in collaboration with Anthropos Foundation, India and JNU, India include:

• Digital Children: a cross-cultural study of on-line educational resources for Children (Under 18s), Primary Care Givers and Educators

• The Museum of the Invisible: a methodology for digital communication of non-Western artifacts to source communities. See “Conversation Pieces: How Digital Technologies might Reinvigorate and reveal the Social Lives of Objects” Pages 37-53 Kahn, Alison (et al.)  https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811619694

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

Her recent film, We, The Zeme (2021) has won awards at international film festivals in India and Europe, and has been sceened at 6 major festivals in the USA, Europe and India. https://odfi.co.uk/in-production/

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).

Her forthcoming monograph: The Pope’s Curator: Monarchs, Missionaries and Material Culture will be published by Springer.

Please see Research page for more information on Alison’s current and past projects.

Charl Sevel MBA (Oxon) Branding and Marketing Director

Charl Sevel: Film and Television Executive Director, Producer and Financier: is a +10 year qualified TMT consultant with global branded experience with internationally recognized organizations leveraging a combination of “big four” consulting, “Fortune 100” operations strategy and entrepreneurial business development team work experience. Graduate degrees MSc from LSE and an MBA (Finance) from Oxford. Media Consulting experience includes Price Waterhouse Coopers, Accenture Consulting and CSS Consulting. In house executive management experiences at The Walt Disney Company (Fortune 100). Proven success of moving highly respected businesses to the next level, seizing overlooked opportunities, championing a superior competitive edge, identifying core competence, developing market strategies, managing brand risk, brand equity and implementing global strategies. I bring over 7 years TMT experience in risk, M&A, financing and acquisition analysis to implementation. Including consulting experience with global branded international organizations leveraging a combination of “big four” consulting, “Fortune 100” operations strategy and entrepreneurial business development team work experience. Graduate qualifications in Economics (MSc) from LSE and an MBA (Finance) from Oxford support my work experience and approach to solving complex issues. Consulting experience includes Price Waterhouse Coopers, Accenture Consulting and CSS Consulting. In house executive management experiences at The Walt Disney Company (Fortune 100). Proven success of moving highly respected businesses to the next level, seizing overlooked opportunities, championing a superior competitive edge, identifying core competence, developing market strategies, managing brand equity and implementing strategies.

Alexander Goldberg (Tutor)

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. Fridolin Wild (Tutor)

Dr Fridolin Wild is a Senior Research Fellow, leading the Performance Augmentation Lab (PAL) of Oxford Brookes University. With the research and development of the lab, Fridolin seeks to close the dissociative gap between abstract knowledge and its practical application, researching radically new forms of linking directly from knowing something ‘in principle’ to applying that knowledge ‘in practice’ and speeding its refinement and integration into polished performance.

Fridolin is leading numerous EU, European Space Agency, and nationally funded research projects, including WEKIT, TCBL, ARPASS, Tellme, TELmap, cRunch, Stellar, Role, LTfLL, iCamp, and Prolearn. Fridolin is the voted treasurer of the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) and leads its Special Interest Group on Wearable-Enhanced Learning (SIG WELL). He chairs the working group on Augmented Reality Learning Experience Models (ARLEM) of the IEEE Standards Association as well as the Natural Language Processing task view of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).

Previously, Fridolin was with the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University from 2009 to 2016, last in his role as a Research Fellow. Before, Fridolin worked as a researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria from 2004 to 2009. He studied at the University of Regensburg, Germany, with extra-murals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Hildesheim.

Dr. Uy Hoang (Tutor)

Dr Uy Hoang is co-founder of The Public Health Film Society will be presenting research and screening films for analysis and discussion.

The Public Health Film Society (PHFS), is a charity registered in the UK (no. 1160590). It was established in 2014 by four public health specialist from Oxford – Dr Uy Hoang, Dr Olena Seminog, Dr Sam Williamson and Dr Stella Botchway, most of whom had been involved in the Oxford Public Health Film Club.

The charity was set up with the aim of ‘bringing together people from many different backgrounds, to encourage them to share their knowledge, skills, and experience, and be inspired through the medium of film to understand public health, and work towards overcoming the public health challenges we all face'(“Vision and mission”. 27 June 2013).

This workshop is aimed to skill-up graduates for the creative industries or prepare post graduate students and professionals who plan to undertake fieldwork at home and abroad or work in museums and archives.

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.

Zeynep Yanar (Project Manager)

BSc Digital Media Production (Oxford Brookes University)

Zeynep is an indépendant filmmaker who has been producing short films since her university years that have been nominated for awards internationally. Her current projects are; ‘Digital Children’, ‘Project 70’, ‘Shh’, ‘Asirlik Cinar Yesilcam’ and ‘The A Word’. She also actively runs projects within Ridinghoodz which is a motorbike group aiming to empower women.