Whether on the page, on screen, or in the gallery, IPPY Gold Medal winning author and anthropologist Roxanne Varzi invites audiences to see—and hear—the world differently, challenging them to confront the images, sounds, and stories that shape our collective imagination.
Anthropologist, Filmmaker, Sound Artist, Playwright, Essayist, Fulbright Scholar
Full Professor, University of California, Irvine
PhD. Columbia University, Anthropology
Multi-Modal Research Design, Visual Anthropology, Storytelling, Ethnography, Academic and Prose Writing, building creativity and dismantling ideology, Religious Studies and non-linear thinking, #dyslexicthinking
The Knot in the Wood: The Call to Multimodal Anthropology
– American Anthropology, March 12, 2019
Research material demands its own form theoretically, philosophically, and politically … Think of a woodcarver who encounters a knot in the wood. Rather than cut the knot out, they incorporate it in their creation.
Ethnography, Ethno-fiction, theater and film are about collaboration—between fact and fiction, art and ethnography, science and human experience, belief and disbelief, the anthropologist and the people—and ultimately about the freedom to create and to openly express our creations, opinions and insights.
Education, for me, is a form of advocacy and a responsibility we have toward shaping the future. Which is why I am deeply deeply dedicated to how we teach and to making my teaching as accessible as possible to a diverse body of students. My latest project uses storytelling — the popular murder mystery genre in particular– to teach a course in anthropology. Each book in the series features a modality of anthropology that I practice and teach. Book one (Death in a Nutshell) introduces visual anthropology and Book two (Silent Scream) introduces the anthropology of sound and attention.
As a multi-modal practitioner I work in text — moving from fiction to poetry to essays and ethnography — and in film and Sound.
Plastic Flowers Never Die Documentary
Plastic Flowers Never Die Documentary
Roxanne Varzi reads from her novel, Last Scene Underground
Roxanne Varzi read from her novel, Last Scene Underground
Last Scene Underground, about theater in contemporary Iran brought me back to theater and philosophy, which led to a lovely conversation with the fabulous director Peter Sellars — someone whose performance work, teaching and philosophy I greatly respect and admire.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/233732929
Accessibility
Accessibility is my mission. My books are available on audio for people who read with their ears.
The Whole World Blind
How better to end war than by teaching how it works.
Virginia Woolf, who influenced Susan Sontag, writes that showing images of war reinscribes their violence.
My sound project The Whole World Blind — based on years of museum research disrupts the power relation between the watcher and the watched.
SoundCloud – The Whole World Blind
Salton Sublime
Ohrenhoch Gallery in Berlin, Germany invited me to make a sound piece.
Salton Sublime meditates on the religious idea of the sublime – which incorporates nature’s awe-inspiring beauty and its danger (in this case massive environmental degradation) by juxtaposing its beauty with its extreme toxicity.
Tehran Tourist Documentary
The best way to experience a country with a multitude of preconceived and prejudiced notions about it, is through the eyes of a child. An ode to Abbas Kiarostami who deftly showed us the world through the eyes of a child, Tehran Tourist is a project in guerrilla filmmaking. Shot predominantly on an iPhone, hand held and on the fly, we move through the Archeology museum in Tehran to a village in Kurdistan (later devastated by an earthquake) to playgrounds and school rooms — in and out of political landscapes and allegory to elucidate an Iran few are privy to.
Playing with a pre-political subject illustrate the powerful ways in which identity and belonging are imprinted as a child makes sense of where he is and where he came from.
The film previewed at UCI to standing room only, with a cinema screening weeks before the 2020 lockdown at the Frida Cinema, in Santa Ana, CA. It has won the Best Shorts Film Awards, Women Filmmakers, and Honorable mentions at the LA Underground Film Forum and the Iranian Film Festival, San Francisco, CA.
Bringing together text and pictures is my forthcoming graphic novel: No wings to fly to God.
Images copyrighted by Kasra Paydavousi 2022
Graphic Novel
The French philosophical foundations of the Iranian Revolution.
