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About Peter
Peter Biella is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at San Francisco State University, where he joined the faculty in 1999 and teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Cinema. He earned his BA and MA in Film Production from San Francisco State University and his MA and PhD in Visual Anthropology from Temple University. Biella's interest in visual anthropology developed in the 1970s under the mentorship of John Collier, Jr., and filmmaker Peter Kubelka in San Francisco. He subsequently studied with Jay Ruby, Richard Chalfen, and Peter Rigby in Philadelphia. From 1984 to 1996, he worked as an independent filmmaker while teaching visual anthropology at Temple University. After teaching at the University of Southern California, he returned to SFSU, his alma mater, to direct the Visual Anthropology BA and MA programs.
Biella specializes in visual anthropology, experimental film, anthropological filmmaking, and interactive ethnography. He has produced films across multiple countries, including the United States, Egypt, Costa Rica, Peru, Romania, and Haiti. Notable productions include the Maasai Migrants Series (2008-2012) and The Chairman and the Lions (2012) in Tanzania, developed collaboratively with Maasai communities using a Freirian approach to address HIV and migration; Yanomamo Interactive: The Ax Fight on CD-ROM, a significant contribution to interactive ethnography; Changa Revisited (2016); and award-winning films Art in Ayacucho and AIDS in the Barrio: Eso no me pasa a mi. His scholarly publications feature titles such as "Visual Anthropology in a Time of War: Intimacy and Interactivity in Ethnographic Media" (2013), "Elementary Forms of the Digital Media: Tools for Applied Action Collaboration and Research in Visual Anthropology" (2013), and "The Ax Fight on CD-ROM" (1998). As past president of the Society for Visual Anthropology and editor of Visual Anthropology Review, Biella has profoundly influenced the field. In 2024, he received the unanimous Society for Visual Anthropology Lifetime Achievement Award.
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