Project Team

Manuela Ciotti

ANTHROFUTURE Principal Investigator

  • Manuela Ciotti is Professor of the Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Global South at the University of Vienna. She has conducted many years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research across a range of sites, both physical and digital, in several countries including India, the USA and Italy. Her research addresses questions of inequality, social justice, and representation and cultural production in the Global South.

Karin Zitzewitz

U.S. Senior Partner

  • Karin Zitzewitz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She is the author of 'Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008' (2022), 'The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India' (2014) and 'The Perfect Frame', the 2003 memoirs of Mumbai gallerist Kekoo Gandhy.

Sanderien Verstappen

Senior Team Member

  • Sanderien Verstappen is Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Visual Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and head of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. As a senior team member of ANTHROFUTURE she is responsible for overseeing the projects' Visual Ethnography components, including training of junior researchers in ethnographic filmmaking, co-supervision of filmmaking projects, and curating the ANTHROFUTURE film festival.

Rugun Sirait

PhD Student

  • A. Rugun Sirait earned her master’s in Digital Anthropology from UCL in 2023. Her dissertation, 'Jedag Jedug: The High-speed Sound Meme of Indonesian TikTok', has been presented at KUNCI Study Forum and exhibited as a sound installation at Jogja Fotografis Festival 2024. A member of the TikTok Ethnography Collective since 2022, she explores media and internet culture with contextual approaches.

Furqan Faridi

PhD Student

  • Furqan Faridi is a researcher, storyteller and journalist from Kashmir. They work with multimedia, exploring themes of social justice, memory, resistance and culture.

Alexandra Ferra-Ringhofer

Project Assistant

  • Alexandra Ferra-Ringhofer is the project assistant. She graduated from the University of Vienna with a degree in Theatre-, Film- and Media Studies and a combination in Journalism, German Studies and philosophy.

Board Members

Artist, Writer and Curator with Raqs Media Collective and Co-Founder of Sarai-CSDS, Delhi

Jeebesh Bagchi

Senior Professor of Global Art History, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies

Monica Juneja

Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand

Lenore Manderson

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Director of the Center for Ethnography at University of California, Irvine

George Marcus

Dean and Professor of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Parul Mukherji

Silver Professor of Anthropology and Expert in Indigenous Art, New York University

Fred Myers

Artist, Dean of the School of Visual Arts and Design BNU Lahore, UNESCO Chair on Inclusion through Art, Creative Director of Design Summit Lahore

Rashid Rana

Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Nora Taylor