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 responsibility and to this end 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 will feature one aspect of anthropology that I have taught over the past twenty years. Book one begins with visual anthropology.
As a multi-modal practitioner I work in text — moving from fiction to poetry to essays and ethnography — to 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 conversation with the fabulous director Peter Sellars — someone whose performance work, teaching and philosophy I greatly 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 see a place with a multitude of preconceived notions attached to 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. The film was shot predominantly on an iPhone, hand held and on the fly. It moves from the Archeology museum in Tehran to a village in Kurdistan (soon-after devastated by an earthquake) to playgrounds and school rooms — in and out of political landscapes and allegory to elucidate an Iran that very few are privy to. The film plays with youthful notions of identity and place and belonging as a child tries to make sense of where he is and where he came from. All the while, it introduces the non-Iranian viewer to an Iran that very few are privy to. 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.
And finally, Bringing together text and pictures… I am working on a graphic novel of my play Splinters of a Careless Alphabet.
Images copyrighted by Kasra Paydavousi 2022
Graphic Novel
The French philosophical foundations of the Iranian Revolution.
