Jeff Silva is an artist, anthropologist, educator, and film programmer working across sonic art, photography, film, and installation. His practice shares a kinship with the traditions of experimental film and audiovisual ethnography, bridging formal experimentation with long-term, immersive fieldwork. For Silva, audiovisual methods are not an illustration of research but its very form: there is no separation between ethnographic inquiry and creative practice, and each work emerges from years of fieldwork and analysis. Across them, he turns ethnography, film, and sound toward the human, ecological, and political consequences of conflict, climate change, and extractivism.
He holds an MFA in Visual Art Practices from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Social Anthropology from EHESS and is a postdoctoral researcher with the A*Midex ANFAA project (Alternative Narrative Forms in Audiovisual Anthropology) at Aix-Marseille University (IDEAS / MMSH), and a member of La Fabrique des écritures ethnographiques (MMSH / CNRS).
His completed projects include the films Mare Sapiens (2026), The Order of Things (2022), From the Land (2018), Linefork (2016), Ivan & Ivana (2011), and Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 Measures of War (2008), along with the immersive installation Nous la mer (2026). His work has been shown at festivals and museums internationally, including MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, FID Marseille, the Viennale, BAFICI, Visions du Réel, Valdivia, and Flahertiana, as well as at ethnographic film festivals and conferences such as the RAI Film Festival, the Festival international Jean Rouch, Ethnofest, and Ethnocineca.
Building community and sustaining dialogue across disciplines, cultures, and generations have been as central to Silva’s trajectory as the works themselves. For more than two decades he has gathered researchers, students, and artists committed to pushing form and challenging the conventions of the social sciences, contemporary art, and cinema. He was present at the inception of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University in 2006, teaching and developing the program’s curriculum and methodology for five years alongside Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The same instinct and commitment shaped his work outside the SEL. In 2000 he co-founded BALAGAN in Boston with Alla Kovgan, an alternative screening series that continues to bring experimental and marginalized films to audiences there, and, later, AgX, an artist-run lab and collective devoted to artisanal, photochemical filmmaking.
Since moving to France in 2015, Silva has helped build a constellation of initiatives in Marseille. With Boris Pétric he has helped to develop La Fabrique des écritures ethnographiques (FEE), an experimental research center at the crossroads of artistic practice and social science. He is part of the ongoing research project Alternative Narrative Forms in Audiovisual Anthropology (ANFAA), directed by Laurent Van Lancker at Aix-Marseille University (IDEAS / MMSH), where artists and researchers explore narrative structures and audiovisual practices that open alternative ways of arranging, telling, feeling, and thinking the world, and of communicating ethnographic field experience. Within ANFAA he is a co-founder and mentor of BAAB (Beyond Audiovisual and Anthropological Boundaries), a 12-month international incubator based in Marseille that selects ten projects a year at the intersection of art, anthropology, and cinema. He also co-programs the monthly screening series Double Vision at Videodrome2, with Claire Lasolle, Ben Russell, and Laurent Van Lancker, bringing visual anthropology and experimental cinema into dialogue with invited guests and the public. Together, these initiatives are making Marseille a gathering point for a new experimental audiovisual anthropology.