I am a media scholar focused on the entanglement of film and contemporary political developments, and I currently work as a Lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). My research interests are at the intersection of arts and politics, documentary theory and practice, film ethics, and critical border studies, which I approach through a combination of textual analysis and qualitative methods such as interviews. I teach and develop a variety of courses in the direction of documentary studies and political cinemas in the BA Media and Culture programme, as well as supervise both BA and MA students.

I defended my NWO-funded PhD research, titled “Cinematic Ethics of Migration: First-Person Voices in Contemporary Documentary”, in November 2024 with a cum laude distinction. My PhD poject (2020-2024) joins the growing interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with the relationship between migration and media by focusing on the ethical demands of first-person voices in contemporary documentary. Building on audio-visual analysis of a number of case studies and a production analysis of the process of their making, my dissertation conceptualizes first-person filmmaking as an everyday practice that is integral to migrants’ negotiation of various bordering mechanisms in Europe towards more sustaining ways of sharing the world with others. Parts of this research have been published in Studies in Documentary Film and in different edited anthologies. I received the 2023 'Best Article' award by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) for my publication on the ethical potential of film for the digital witnessing of conflict, which was published in Postcolonial Publics. I was a Visiting PhD Researcher at Stockholm University's Cinema Studies department (April-June 2023), hosted by prof. dr. Malin Wahlberg.

My current research aims for a critical evaluation of artistic freedom in contemporary European cinemas, focusing on both direct and indirect pressures filmmakers face, as well as their intertwinement with self-censorship, from an intersectional lens. I conducted preliminary research for this project during my time as a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at the ECHO: Media, Research & Politics research group at the Free University of Brussels (September-December 2024), hosted by prof. dr. Kevin Smets.

I regularly collaborate with cultural institutions on public programs. Between 2019-2023 I worked as a contributing programmer on the film selection of the world’s leading documentary festival, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). I have also recently developed a curated film program titled 'Hometactics' for Interaction: Short Docs Festival (2024). I currently collaborate with Decolonial Furures (UvA) and Het Documentaire Paviljoen in Amsterdam on an ongoing program series titled 'Cinema under Siege', which explores the risks filmmakers face under political regimes that monitor, censor, and suppress dissent.

Before starting my PhD, I obtained a research MA degree in Media Studies at the UvA, and a BA degree in Film Studies and Philosophy at Amsterdam University College.