An van Dienderen

An van. Dienderen (Ghent University)(1971) has a master's in audiovisual arts (Sint-Lukas, Brussels) and a PhD in Comparative Sciences of Culture (Ghent University). She was a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley rhetoric department. She has made several documentaries screened worldwide and has been awarded with national and international prizes. VISITORS OF THE NIGHT (1998) deals with the matriarchal society of the Mosuo women in the province of Yunnan, China. She was commissioned in 2000 by the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts in Brussels to make the film SITE, a portrait of the choreographer José Besprosvany. She produced and directed with Didier Volckaert TU NE VERRAS PAS VERAPAZ, released in 2002. The film elaborates on the history of the (Belgian) colonization of Santo Tomas de Castilla in Guatemala in 1843, and links this to themes such as migration and cultural identity. She regularly gives lectures and writes on visual/performative anthropology. Her main interests are the intersection between art and science, visual anthropology, art processes, and cultural diversity. (09/09)

Visitors of the Night
A film by An van Dienderen, 1998, 34 min., Color
The failures of the ethnographic endeavor to discover “reality” are revealed in this expository and experimental film. The narrator-ethnographer emba...