Person

Amaya Sumpsi

Postdoctoral Researcher

Amaya Sumpsi is a cinema director and visual anthropologist, with a master 's and doctorate in this area from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Since 2017, she has been one of the coordinators of NAVA – Research Center for Visual Anthropology and Arts (CRIA-UNL/ISCTE). At the same time, Amaya Sumpsi frequently collaborates with the Visual Anthropology Laboratory at FCSH-UNL, and was a professor of “Anthropology and Image” at ISCTE-UNL University (2022-2023). She studied filmmaking at the “Escuela Universitaria de Artes-” (Madrid) and at the University of San Francisco (USF- California): her first documentary “Meu Pescador, meu Velho” (Portugal, 2012), was the result of a 7- years long fieldwork, and premiered at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival (Edinburgh, 2013) and was selected for numerous international film festivals. In Portugal, it won the Camacho Costa prize for the best Portuguese-speaking documentary at the Cine Eco-Seia festival (2013) and the Octávio Lixa Filgueiras Research Prize in Sea Studies, awarded by the Ílhavo Maritime Museum (2013). In 2018, she was one of the directors of the documentary “Um Ramadão em Lisboa”, a film about the muslim communities in the big area of Lisbon that premiered at the Indie Lisboa festival (2019) and was exhibited on RTP 2 –public TV channel- (2021). In 2021-2022 she was a volunteer in the Academia CV programme (Associação Renovar a Mouraria) where she worked with immigrant kids from India. Her latest film “Entre Ilhas” (2022), was produced by the production company Cedro Plátano and received financial support from ICA and RTP for completion. “Entre Ilhas” was the result of a four-years fieldwork and had its premiere on June 21, 2022 at Cinemateca Portuguesa and debuted on the commercial circuit, with screenings in cinemas in Porto (Cinema Trindade) and Cinemas City in Setúbal, Leiria and Lisbon: at Cinema City Alvalde (Lisbon ) was on display for 7 weeks. It was also selected for festivals in Spain, France and Tunisia and today it continues to tour numerous theaters and film clubs in Portugal. In 2023 “Entre Ilhas” received an honorable mention in the “Margot Dias and Benjamim Pereira” award (Anthropology of Sound and Image) and was one of the nominees for best feature-length documentary by the Portuguese Cinema Academy (Sophia Mello Breyner Awards) . It received the Sophia Mello Breyner award for the best cinema poster from
the same institution, and also from the Melgaço International Documentary Festival. Over the decades living in Portugal, she has also worked as a cameraman and production assistant for directors such as Catarina Alves Costa, Raquel Castro, Inês Oliveira, Christine Reeh and Tiago Pereira. She is frequently invited to lecture about visual anthropology and experimental ethnographies in portuguese universities.

Amaya Sumpsi will be developing her pos doctoral work on WP4 which is coordinated by Iscte.