Ari is a tenured Assistant Professor of Screen Media in the Department of Media and Culture Studies and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University.
He is an elected Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) and a Research Fellow in the Department of Art History and Image Studies at the University of the Free State—South Africa. In 2025, he was inducted into the Utrecht Young Academy (UYA), an organization for young academics who want to bridge research university, academia, and society.
He previously held academic positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon (USA), Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), University Lecturer at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), and Lecturer at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands).
