Sofia Sampaio is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). She works in the intersection of anthropology, history, and cinema/media/ tourism studies, combining ethnographic methods, multi-archival work (with a focus on moving image archives) and content analysis (of texts and images). Departing from film collections held by ANIM–National Archive of the Moving Images (Portuguese Cinematheque), she has conducted field and archival work in Portugal and Brazil to investigate mobile, but situated, film and cine-touristic cultures, with a focus on different scales (local, national, transnational), decades (1920-1930) and periods (Marcelismo and the April Revolution). These and other research projects – which have been supported by FCT, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Project EXPL/IVC-ANT/1706/2013; Contract IF/00313/2013), and by CNPq, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Project 402850/2018-1- APQ) – have enabled and buttressed her work towards a connected social history of cinema in Portugal.

At ICS-ULisboa, she is conducting research on contemporary filmmaking practices in Portugal, with a project intitled ‘Is there an industry in this film? An ethnography of film production in Portugal’ (CEECIND/03453/2018/CP1541/CT0008), which mobilises historical perspectives and the anthropology of media and work to criticise and improve Portuguese audiovisual public policies, in the context of growing vulnerability and rapid change in the sector.

The results of her research have been published in national and international peer-reviewed journals, such as Ethnography (UK); Studies in European Cinema (UK), Early Popular Visual Culture (UK), History and Anthropology (UK); Film History (US); Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (UK); Etnográfica (Portugal); Análise Social (Portugal); Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social (Brazil), among others. She has guest-edited special issues for the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (2014), Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia (2014), Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image (2016) and Etnográfica (2021), and edited the books Viagens, Olhares e Imagens: Portugal 1910-1980 (Cinemateca Portuguesa–Museu do Cinema, 2017) and A Propósito dos Outros Filmes: Encontros com o Arquivo de Imagens em Movimento (FGV Editora, 2022), with Thais Blank.

In 2020-2024, she was Editor-in-chief of Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. She was a visiting researcher in the School of Social Sciences of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV CPDOC), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2019), and a FLAD Professor and visiting lecturer in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies of Brown University, United States (2022). Since 2022-2023 she is part of the teaching staff of the PhD in Anthropology of the University of Lisbon (DANT-ULisboa). She also teaches short courses on moving image archives, archive-based research methods, the relationship between cinema and history, the history of cinema in Portugal (with a focus on cine-touristic practices), among other topics.

She is currently supervising Ana Algarra Navarro’s FCT-funded PhD project, “A ver si, entre vecinos, acabamos por conocernos. An entangled history of film culture between Portugal and Spain in transitional times (1962-1982)”, which is part of the PIUDHIST Inter-University Doctoral Programme in History, in co-mentorship with Fernando Ramos Arenas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Espanha).

Sofia is a member of the ICS-ULisboa Scientific Council. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the international peer-reviewed journal NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (ISSN 2213-0217) and member of the Advisory Board of the international journal Early Popular Visual Culture (ISSN 17460654, Taylor & Francis). Since May 2024, she is President of AIM, the Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers.

Research interests: media and visual anthropology; film/cinematographic cultures; connected social histories of cinema in Portugal; tourism and visuality; circulation, migration and uses of moving images; ethnographies of media production; tourism, travel and ethnographic cinema; creative industries; creative work; moving image archives; silent cinema; April Revolution cinema; cultural and audiovisual policies.

Sofia is interested in supervising or co-supervising graduate and post-graduate students in any of these areas.