Director – Stephanie Spray
Stephanie Spray is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where she also directs the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts. She is a filmmaker, anthropologist and educator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and art, with research interests in social aesthetics; visual, sonic, and media anthropology; conservation, climate change and the anthropology of science; and everyday religious practices. For many years in Nepal, she worked with itinerant musicians, known as the Gandharva or the Gāine, with whom she made five films and sound works, culminating in her feature-length film Manakamana (2013, co-directed with Pacho Velez), which won numerous awards, including two Golden Leopards at the Locarno International Film Festival and first prize at BAFICI, and was followed by a sustained theatrical release in the US, U.K., Canada, Germany, and Japan. She is currently working on a film with conservationists in the south of Chile. Dr. Spray earned her PhD in Social Anthropology with Media at Harvard University, a Master of Theological Studies in the study of religion from Harvard Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts in the Study of Religion from Smith College.
Project Specialist – Tasnim Boufelfel
Tasnim Boufelfel is a filmmaker born in the Sonoran Desert and currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her work explores the poetry of the human experience, magnifying the intimate and the everyday as spiritual. Memory—both personal and collective—serves as a central theme in her films, functioning as a way to archive undocumented histories. Tasnim’s visual storytelling is driven by a fascination with cinema’s transformative power, an alchemical process that imagines new worlds and possibilities.
Her films have been showcased at festivals and online platforms, such as Palm Springs International Film Festival, Paris Independent Film Festival, and Sixteen Film Institute. Tasnim earned a BFA in Film & Television from the University of Arizona, where she was awarded Best New Filmmaker in 2019. She also has a background in education, having designed and facilitated healing-based filmmaking workshops at ArtworxLA for alternative education youth.
