Meet our fellows

February 21, 2018

Bucharest

Six young researchers working with engaged citizens to create mutual learning for better neighbourhood living.

As we’re approaching week 5 of our applied-research-meets-grassroots-initiatives programme, we want to share the profiles of the six fellows we’re prototyping this live learning set-up with.

Ruth Coman is an urban planner. She studied Spatial Planning in Vienna and Urban Design in Hamburg. Her recent projects include migration issues in both Eastern and Western cities of Europe. She has recently returned to Romania and is currently focusing on her motif of reinterpreting the planner’s activity in today’s urban arrangements.

Irina Dobriță is finalising her Visual Anthropology MA (2018) after having taken a long detour in fields like advertising, public relations, environmental and social activism and advocacy. The workings and problematic of public participation are a constant preocupation, while documentary film is her medium of choice for observing and giving voice. She is the author of Artificii, currently playing at The Comedy Theatre.

Marian Leica is a systems software engineer and anthropology student. He combines the life of a Microsoft engineer with the pursuit of a bachelor degree in Anthropology at the University of Bucharest, a choice he calls “a passion for the world.” Kindled by a win at the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards, his major interests are visual anthropology and faraway cultures.

Fatme Nistoroi. Knowledge wanderer and creative mind, Fatme’s interests are landscape architecture, art history, philosophy of culture and cultural heritage. She considers herself an image addict, showing a great interest for visual studies. While taking great joy from researching narrative environments, she keeps cities in sight in her effort to create original and engaging experiences.

Ilinca Pop will soon be an architect (2018) and is particularly interested in cultural heritage and design anthropology. She is a founding member of Z9 Magazine, a journal of arts & culture initiated in 2012. Since September 2017, she is involved in managing the 3rd Bucharest East-Centric Triennale organized by the Arhitext Design Foundation. She sometimes works as a freelance illustrator and takes photographs of friends that end up as covers for poetry books.

Ioana Țurcan is a filmmaker and visual artist from Romania who currently lives in Bucharest and works as a creative producer for Adenium Film. She is enrolled in a post-masters course at the Royal Institute of Art in Sweden that engages with the topic of dignity and representation in image. She holds an MFA in Film and Video Production from Syracuse University, College of Visual and Performing Arts, New York, where she attended under a Fulbright Award.

We’re excited to have this multidisciplinary mix of bright young professionals with diverse and complementary interests as our first generation of fellows. Their critical and creative input is essential in making this first iteration of the programme a rich learning experience.

As promised, we’ll use this blog to give updates about our journey creating this pilot edition of a live learning programme. A post about the first sessions, which introduced some theoretical and methodological notions to ground our work in, is coming up next. After that, one about the first field explorations and the prep work for a key moment: meeting the engaged neighbours who have self-organised into a civic initiative group and are working to make their neighbourhood a better place to live.

Stay tuned!