Mara Lin Visser is a freelance visual anthropologist and filmmaker based in Barcelona. All through her BA in Media & Culture, she was interested in different forms of media and its ability to affect people by making them think, feel, question or act. Film as a medium gives Mara Lin the freedom to express her thoughts about certain topics and academic observations in a natural way. The camera is a strong tool to explore and conduct research. For her MA in Visual Anthropology, Mara Lin went to Ghana for her fieldwork. Her research resulted in the film Unity: Dress-scapes of Accra (2016), which has been screened at several film festivals (RAI, Ethnofest and won Best Student Award at SVA).
At the moment Mara Lin is a visitor research at Getp-GRAFO (Research Group of the Cross-cultural Study of Kinship) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona doing research on queer communities; she is an instructor at afilm, International Film Workshops, teaching Film History & Media Studies and she is part of the collective ethnovision, which aims to bridge the knowledge-gap between the academics and a bigger audience using the power of audiovisual research methods. Also, she is exploring the field of participatory methods, ethnofiction and artistic research practices because she thinks this could uncover social structures in an interesting way. For Mara Lin, the most interesting. part of filmmaking is connecting with people; making them feel comfortable by spending time without a camera, enhancing the protagonist’s freedom to tell their own stories in their own way. She is interested in (in)equality, queer culture, participation society, material culture, geopolitics, ecology and art. She speaks Dutch, English and is learning Spanish.
For Mara Lin’s personal work click here.