Nominated Fellow, December 2021 – July 2022
Home Institution: University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
Email: aida.vallejo@ehu.eus
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2433-0675
Aida Vallejo is associate professor at the University of the Basque Country (Spain), where she teaches Documentary Film Theory and Practice, and Narrative Theory. A Film Historian (PhD, Autonomous University of Madrid), and documentary expert (MA, Autonomous University of Barcelona), Aida holds degrees in Socio-cultural Anthropology (UNED) and Audiovisual Communication (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU). She writes and teaches in English, Spanish and Basque, and speaks French, Italian and Modern Greek.
Her research focuses on creative documentary and film festivals. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of cultural industries, she brings together methodologies and theoretical frameworks from Media Studies, Anthropology, Film History and the Digital Humanities. She has co-edited the books Documentary Film Festivals Vol.1 and Vol.2 and Film Festivals and Anthropology and published several academic articles (about documentary film, film festivals, narratology, creative industries and ethnography / anthropology of media).
Aida is the founder and coordinator of the Documentary workgroup of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) and principal investigator of ikerFESTS research project, which maps film festivals in the Basque context. She has been a visiting scholar at St Andrews University and University of Glasgow (Scotland), FAMU (Prague) and Masaryk University (Czech Republic), Central European University (Budapest) and Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece).
She is a member of the selection committees of the San Sebastian International Film Festival’s documentary co-production forum and Cine Invisible Human Rights Film Festival. She has served on the juries and offered seminars and talks at several international festivals and is the coordinator of the Spanish delegation of the European Film Academy’s University Award. https://www.eufa.org/
Project title: IDFmap: Mapping Institutes of Documentary Film
https://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/dokuleku/idfmap-project/
The IDFmap project will create a global map of institutes for the promotion of documentary film and will analyse their role as intermediaries between industry and creativity. It will pay particular attention to their relationships with film festivals, professional networks and geo-cultural areas of influence.
Taking the Scottish Documentary Institute (SDI) –based in Edinburgh– as a case study, the project aims to reconstruct networking practices and collaboration models to evaluate their impact in fostering local documentary film communities, the global circulation of their works and the energisation of creative industries.
The project will rely on Digital Humanities tools for data collection, social network analysis and visualisation of research outputs and datasets. With that aim, it will create an interactive website displaying the global map of institutes of documentary film, including detailed information about the Scottish Documentary Institute and the professional and cultural networks built around it in the last two decades.
This project is funded by the Department of Education of the Basque Government (MV_2021_1_0010).
