Gregory Gan

I am an anthropologist, filmmaker and media artist. I was born in 1984 in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. My family moved to France when I ten years old, and again to Canada two years later. As an anthropologist and filmmmaker, I have traveled extensively for my work, and I currently split my time between Berlin, Germany, and Toronto, Canada, while enrolled in a PhD program in Vancouver.

As a visual anthropologist, I am constantly negotiating distinctions between academic and artistic practices. While I dedicate a significant effort to blur such distinctions, they are useful as a "practical essentialism," as a means to organize thoughts and structure content.

Academic research

I have trained as an anthropologist and filmmaker at the University of Toronto (HBA Anthropology 2006), Ryerson University (Continuing Education in Film Studies 2007), Memorial University of Newfoundland (MA Anthropology 2010) and The University of British Columbia (PhD Anthropology, defending January 2019).

My professional research has covered the themes of intellectual history, anthropology of gender, new religious movements and material culture. My current media projects include an interactive, multi-media installation on the life histories of Russian transnational migrants, a multimedia digital archive on the material culture of migration, and an autoethnographic book project on Russian migration, past and present. I have presented my work internationally, and published in a couple of journals, including Critique of Anthropology (2015, 35(2): 166-186), Revolutionary Russia (in press, 2019) and Smena [Change] (2010, 11, 66-71, in Russian).

Art & Media

I began my studies in film at Ryerson University in 2007. Since then, I have made feature-length documentary films (Turning Back the Waves, 2010; Theory of Happiness, 2014), short films (Negative Space, 2007; Longpoint, 2009) experimental 8mm and 16mm films (Arrived, 2014) and commercial work (Phantom Couriers: Ghost in the Machine, 2015; CityLab: Berlin, 2017).

I have worked in diverse media, including watercolours, printmaking and photography. I am currently developing a 3D animation project based on traditional Russian marionette theatre.