Inês Ponte (1979, Lisbon, Portugal) is an anthropologist developing, as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, the project Mobilising Archives: photography in Southwest Angola. Combining archival research in Portugal and fieldwork in Angola, the project explores the development of ethnographic photography through collections created in the same region between the 1930s and the 1990s.
Her research interests include material culture, visuality, knowledge production and history of anthropology, anthropology of skill, livelihoods, and articulations with identity. Her work follows an ethnographic approach (Brazil, Angola), and she is also a museum researcher (Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium) engaging with institutional and private archives. She combines anthropology with history as a way to explore relations between the local-regional-global from a postcolonial perspective in several geographies (Angola, India), as well as the potential of visual methods for research, namely, cinema, photography and drawing.
She has collaborated in transdisciplinary teams crisscrossing anthropology with psychology, literature, art critic, education and communication, in Portugal, India, the UK and Angola. In 2015 she was co-curator of A Delicate Zone of Commitment, an exhibition about working processes inspired by the work of anthropologist, filmmaker and writer Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941-2010), having developed in parallel RDC Virtual, a digital online film repository of and about the author, and with a catalogue associated. Besides interventions on the web, she has authored documentaries and visual essays, a museum catalogue (Portuguese and English), a booklet supporting learning to read and write in olunyaneka and articles in peer-reviewed journals.
She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media (2015, University of Manchester, UK, with an FCT Grant), having presented a thesis about the local production and transnational collecting of handcrafted dolls in Southwest Angola and the one-hour version of the film Making a Living in the Dry Season. She holds a post-graduation in Documentary Directing (2005, Universidade Lusófona, Portugal), and a 4-year Bachelor degree in Social Anthropology (2003, ISCTE, Portugal).
She has also taught on materiality, visual anthropology, visual methodologies and film directing (2013-2015, University of Manchester, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology; 2015-2016, Escola Superior de Comunicação Social, Lisbon, Portugal).

Keywords: Anthropology; Postcolonialism; Material Culture; Archives; Angola