Inês Ponte (1979, Lisbon) is an anthropologist and research fellow.

She conducts research on material and visual culture, with a focus on photography and cinema, combining fieldwork, archival research (institutional and personal collections), and visual methodologies from a historical perspective. Since February 2023, she has been Scientific Coordinator of the Social History Archive at ICS-ULisboa.

Her research explores the potential of visual methodologies in scholarship, including film, photography, and drawing, as well as curatorial practice. In 2026, she was one of the curators of A Guerra Guardada Visita Luanda (Instituto Camões), an adapted version of the exhibition The War Kept: Photography of Portuguese Soldiers in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (1961–74), which she co-curated with Maria José Lobo Antunes at the Museu do Aljube, Lisbon (2022). In 2015, she co-curated Uma Delicada Zona de Compromisso (UDZC), an exhibition based on the work of anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941–2010).

She conceived the website www.hisfotant.org, dedicated to the history of ethnographic photography and cinema in Angola from a longue durée perspective. She is the author of documentaries and visual essays, a museum catalogue, a literacy support booklet for rural education in Olunyaneka, and articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has co-edited A Guerra Guardada (2024, Tinta-da-China).

She was a postdoctoral researcher under CEEC and Marie Skłodowska-Curie (European Commission) fellowships, and a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media (2015, University of Manchester, UK, FCT-funded), having defended a doctoral project comprising a thesis on local production and transnational circulation of handmade dolls in rural southwest Angola, as well as the 63-minute film Making a Living in the Dry Season. She also holds a postgraduate diploma in Documentary Filmmaking (2006, Universidade Lusófona) and a BA in Anthropology (2003, ISCTE).

She has taught on the PhD Programme in Anthropology at ICS-ULisboa (DANT), the MSc in Sustainability, and the MSc in Science Communication at the University of Lisbon, and has also been a guest lecturer in material culture, visual anthropology, visual methodologies, and fiction and documentary filmmaking.

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