Paul Henley

Biography

Education and training: I studied for a BA in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, 1969-1973, including 1971-1972 as an anthropological field assistant at the Laboratorio de Antropología of the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (IVIC), Caracas. This was followed by a PhD, also at Cambridge, 1974-1979, based on fieldwork amongst the Panare (E''ñepa) of southern Venezuela, supervised by Professor J.A. Barnes. I also studied as a Leverhulme Film Training Fellow at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield, 1984-1987, graduating as director-cameraman. I subsequently worked as a freelance film-maker for UK television as well as pursuing an academic career.

Academic posts: I was appointed as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and  first Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in 1987. I was also Director of the University Media Centre, 1989-1993. I became Professor in Visual Anthropology in 2001.

In January 2014, I stood down as Director of the Granada Centre in order to take up a three-year Leverhulme Senior Fellowship. Under the general title The Silent Time Machine, this project has consisted of an investigation of early ethnographic film, with particular reference to Brazil and France.

Previous positions: Lecturer, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, 1979-1980; Junior Research Fellow, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 1980-1983.

Professional associations: Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI); since 1988, member of the RAI Film Committee (Chair, 1993-1998); Director, RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, 1990, 1992, 2007, 2017.

Film festival juries: Bilan du Film Ethnographique, Musée de L''Homme, Paris (1991, Chair 2006, 2007); Sibiu International Ethnographic Film Festival, Romania (Chair, 1996); Nuoro International Ethnological Film Festival, Sardinia (2002); Espiello Muestra de Documental Etnográfico, Huesca, Spain (2010, Chair 2014 )

External assessor: Instituto de Antropologia, Arqueologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2003); Équipe de Recherches de Ethnologie Amerindienne, CNRS, Villejuife, Paris (2001); Laboratorio de Imagem e Som en Antropologia (LISA), Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil (1999);.East Asia Institute of Visual Anthropology (EAIVA), Yunnan University, Kunming, PR China (1998-2000)

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