Lee Douglas is a visual anthropologist, curator, and filmmaker who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA University Lisbon. Combining ethnographic research and multimodal media production, she unpacks how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through collective and individual engagements with the traces of political violence, displacement, and decolonization in Spain, Portugal, and the Iberian Atlantic. As a scholar, educator, and practitioner, she is committed to forms of collaborative visual research capable of mobilizing anthropological research findings across disciplines and borders. In this spirit, she undertakes multimodal media projects to elucidate how the past bears on the present through diverse visual forms.
She is the head researcher for the project “Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories” (MSCA-IF-2019-895197) which analyzes individual and collective uses of the material and visual traces left by entangled historical events: the Carnation Revolution that marked an end to Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship; the conclusion of the Portuguese imperial project; and the return migrations sparked by these events. Prior to her work at the IHC, she was a Lecturer of anthropology and visual culture at NYU-Madrid and a Research Fellow in the Collections Department at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
She is the Co-Editor in Chief of Visual Anthropology Review, a member of the Writing with Light Editorial Collective, and a Working Group Leader for the TRACTS Cost Action Network.