School of Visual Anthropology 2025

Where
Belgrade & Požarevac, Serbia
When
26th September – 6th October 2025
NOTE: Please note that 26th of September is day 0 of the workshop, so the day participants are arriving to the School. 6th of October is the last day of the workshop, so 7th of October is check-out day
Price
800€
This price includes:
accommodation for 11 nights, two meals, travel between Belgrade and Požarevac, all materials and equipment necessary for the workshop*
*The price can be paid in installments
Professors
  • Thomas John - research associate at University of Münster

  • Research Associate, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University Berlin
    At the moment he is finalizing his PhD thesis on affective and emotional negotiations within a local South Mexican indigenous audio-visual documentary art scene.
    He is a trained filmmaker and visual anthropologist, too, and teaches since 2013 practical and theoretical audio-visual anthropology classes at the WWU Münster, where he is involved at the Institute of Ethnology and the MA Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices. https://weiterbildung.uni-muenster.de/anthropology
    He is interested especially in exploring the filed of intersection between documentary arts and visual anthropology, artistic research practices, and experimental modes of the representation of human experience.

  • Dragan Nikolić -director, screenwriter, cinematographer
  • . His movies areThe Undertaker (ranked among the TOP 10 European TV documentaries by the Prix Europa jury and winner of Best Serbian Documentary at Beldocs), Caviar Connection (awarded Best Documentary at major regional festivals including Sarajevo Film Festival, ZagrebDox, and Trieste Film Festival), and National Park. All three films premiered at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) and were screened at over 100 international festivals. They have been broadcast on ZDF/Arte (Germany / France / Austria / Switzerland / Italy), Channel 4 (UK), SVT (Sweden), NRK (Norway), YLE (Finland), RTV SLO (Slovenia), Al Jazeera Balkans, DBS (Israel), Global Voices (USA) and 92 PBS channels in the USA. He is the screenwriter of the feature film Love Cuts (Reži) (FEST, 2019), co-writer of Made in Serbia (FEST, 2005) and Run Rabbit Run (Beži Zeko, Beži, Cannes Film Festival, 2003 – Best Film, Cinéfondation), as well as numerous TV series (Suspicious Characters, Felix, Emergency Room, Sinđelići, Little Manchester, Theologian, Farmers).

  • Iva Nenić teaches at the Department of Ethnomusicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade.

  • She received MPhil in Theory of Arts and Media (2009), and PhD in Ethnomusicology (2015) with a dissertation on women’s performance of traditionally male folk instruments in Serbia, coupled with the attendance of the advanced undergraduate one-year programs at the Belgrade Open School and the Women’s Studies Center in Belgrade. Her research spans theory of ideology and identification, gender regimes, transgenerational memory, and the sustainability of cultural and artistic scenes in late capitalism. In ethnomusicology, she focuses on the Serbian and Balkan world music/ethno scenes, alternative/independent culture, cultural revival, and women’s roles in music. She has lectured internationally (Austria, UK, Japan, Italy, Slovenia, Finland), presented at numerous conferences in Serbia and abroad, and translated works in ethnomusicology and philosophy. Her monograph "Gusle Players and Female Instrumentalists in Serbia: Identification by Sound" (2019) received the SEFEM “Anđelka Milić” Award (2020). She co-nominated frula playing for Serbia’s National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage (with Dr Mirjana Zakić) and led the project “Female Leadership in Music” (Science Fund of Serbia, 2020–2023). She is Vice-Chair of the ICTMD Study Group on Music, Gender, and Sexuality and co-editor of Women’s Leadership in Music (with dr Linda Cimardi, transcript Verlag, 2023).

  • Jelena Jovčić, anthropologist, new media artist, documentary film maker, digital archivist, and curator.

  • Autobiographical narratives merge with critical reflections on cultural policy and archival practice, opening a space where private experience becomes collective memory. Her work was presented at Cinéma du Réel, DOK Leipzig, and in the Museum of Yugoslavia and the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. For many years she edited and curated the International Festival of Ethnological Film, while also contributing to major archival projects, including the digitization of the national television collection.
    As co-founder of Ateliers Varan Belgrade and then the artistic collective Remorker, she weaves film, anthropology, and new media. Active in film education and consulting since 2006, she maintains a long-term collaboration with Columbia College Chicago. She has given guest lectures and workshops at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts and Masaryk University, FAMU Centre. She previously held the position of coordinator for film education at the Film Center Serbia.
    About
    The School of Visual Anthropology 2025 workshop will last 11 days and will be subdivided in three major parts: theory, field work and editing. Aside from the necessary knowledge and technology we provide homey accommodation and two meals per day. VAC successfully organized the School of Visual Anthropology workshop five years consecutively for chiefly Serbian participants; more than 100 people participated with the help of 30 lecturers and mentors. In 2018 we opened for the first time to international applicants and it was the best choice we'd ever made. Local scholars had new impulse, foreigners saw a new environment - it was inspirational for all of us. The following years we managed to host even more participants with an even richer program. This year we set ourselves a new goal - for our whole initiative to be decentralized. Not just the school of course - but a network of socially engaged filmmakers sharing what they've got for their work to find its audiences and have the desired impact. Word by Relja Pekić, director of VAC & mentor of SVA 25: "In a time when social realities are increasingly fragmented, distorted, or obscured by dominant narratives, socially engaged ethnographic film becomes a powerful tool to reveal what is hidden, silenced, or overlooked. This program approaches fieldwork not as passive observation, but as embodied engagement — walking, listening, touching, and working alongside the Others.
    Rooted in cinéma vérité traditions, the camera serves as an active collaborator on site, provoking and participating in the scene rather than just capturing it from a distance. As Jean Rouch once said, “The camera is not only an observation instrument, it is also a means of creating reality.” Echoing this, Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us that “There is no such thing as documentary — there is only a viewpoint.” Participants will explore how sounds, gestures, and materials reveal deeper truths about social and economic transformations in post-socialist spaces. The focus is on collaborative storytelling, where researchers and participants co-create meaning through shared movement, dialogue, and filmmaking. The city of Požarevac, shaped by its industrial past and uncertain present, becomes a living archive of working-class memory and resistance. Through this immersive and politically grounded approach, we aim to challenge visual hierarchies and rethink the ethics of representation — because, as radical anthropologist David Graeber once said, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
    Application form
    Mentors
  • Danilo Stanimirović - filmmaker

  • Danilo Stanimirović is a young filmmaker and chocolate lover. With his short films Bambiland, Prokop and 5/3/0 he has visited hundreds of international festivals and won numerous awards. He is an alum of many workshops and programs including FIDCampus Marseille, Sarajevo Talents Campus, Ateliers Varan, European Short Pitch, Torino Short FIlm Market… He has a background in film education and directing TV series. Currently he is working on 3 new films.

  • Relja Pekić - MA Anthropologist, director of VAC

  • Master of ethnology and anthropology, a documentary and visual anthropologist from Belgrade, and his interest in the field of scientific research is mostly focused on visual anthropology, anthropology of sport, anthropology of tourism, applied anthropology and sensory ethnography.
    Editor of the magazine for interdisciplinary audiovisual research, visual anthropology and ethnographic film - "Vizantrop". He is the author of several short ethnographic films that were screened at ethnographic festivals in Ljubljana, Zadar, Prague, Belgrade, Prizren, Moscow and Skopje, and for the film "Crossroads of Culture" (2013) he received the audience award for the best student film at SEF festival in Croatia.
    He is a founder of the "Visual Anthropology School" workshop from Belgrade and participated as a lecturer at many seminars and conferences in the Balkans.
  • Ada Rajković - filmmaker


  • Ada is a filmmaker from Houston Texas. She is interested in autoethnography and experimental film. She founded the artist-run gallery and community space Sunday in Los Angeles after graduating from CalArts in 2013. In 2016 she was artist in residence at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. She just completed her masters in ethnographic documentary from University College London with a thesis focus on tracing her family history in a country that no longer exists.

    Timetable in brief
    Belgrade: 26.9: day 0; arriving and meeting up 27-28.9: Lectures and sensory exercises 29.9: Transfer to Požarevac and preparing the fieldwork 30.9-2.10: Fieldwork (filming) 3-5.10: Editing 5th evening: screening in Požarevac 6th: transfer to Belgrade, networking & screening in the evening