Sofia Sampaio (n. 1972) is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. She received a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Lisbon and an M.A. in Anglo-American Studies from the University of Porto. She has held posts as post-doctoral fellow (2009-2013) and assistant research fellow (2014-2018) at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) of the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), where she coordinated a research project on the Portuguese tourism film, in association with the National Archive of the Moving Images (ANIM) of the Portuguese Cinémathèque (Cinemateca Portuguesa–Museu do Cinema). In 2019, she was a visiting research fellow in the School of Social Sciences of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a project funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She has been an associate graduate student at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2005), a visiting scholar in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California Riverside (2011), and in the Departamento de Teoria dels Llenguatges i Ciències de la Comunicació, University of Valencia, Spain (2017), and a FLAD Professor and visiting lecturer in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies of Brown University (2022).

Dr Sampaio has conducted fieldwork in Portugal and Brazil to investigate Portuguese film culture, with a focus on the practices and materiality of films as traveling objects. Her research methods combine content analysis, multi-archival work, direct observation and interviews, at the crossroads of anthropology, media studies, film history and tourism studies. She has published articles and reviews in national and international peer-reviewed journals, 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), and guest-edited special issues for the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (2014), Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia (2014), Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem e Movimento (2016) and Etnográfica (2021).

At present, her research interests cover the following topics: (1) film production practices in Portugal; (2) the marginal histories of Portuguese cinema; (3) the theorisation of cinema and the moving image archive with a focus on their materialities; (4) cine-touristic cultures and their intersections with colonial culture; (5) media ethnography. She is currently conducting research on contemporary filmmaking practices in Portugal, with a project titled ‘Is there an industry in this film? An ethnography of film production in Portugal’ (CEECIND/03453/2018/CP1541/CT0008).

Since May 2020 she is Editor-in-chief of Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image.

Areas of Activity: (Media, Visual) Anthropology (of art, of labour, of tourism); History (of cinema);  Cultural (visual cultures and tourism) and Media Studies (cinema, intermediality). She is interested in supervising M.A. and PhD students in these areas.

Keywords: Ethnography; film production practices; creative work; moving image archives; Portuguese film culture; Portuguese film history.