About Gregory Gan

I am a filmmaker, media artist, and visual anthropologist specializing in transnational migration, material culture, and experimental media. I received my PhD at The University of British Columbia in 2019. My training as a filmmaker resulted in two acclaimed ethnographic films, Turning Back the Waves (2010), based on seven women intellectuals in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and The Theory of Happiness (2014), in which I became a participant in a radical Ukrainian sect trying to discover happiness through mathematical formulas, and which was nominated for Best Canadian Documentary at the Hot Docs International Film Festival. I expanded my practice to encompass multimedia work, and have since toured with a mobile, interactive installation, Still Life with a Suitcase (2017-2019), where audience members were able to decide the narrative flow of the work by manipulating smart objects.

As a visual artist, I am have worked and exhibited in relief printmaking, watercolour painting, and interactive art. In the summer of 2021, and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I have begun a postdoctoral position at Freie Universität in Berlin, in which I am developing a series of watercolour paintings based on the material cultures of displaced apartment dwellers in Moscow and Berlin. I currently live in Berlin, Germany.