About

I am a film and screen media scholar, educator, and filmmaker based in the Netherlands. I am a tenured Assistant Professor of Screen Media at Utrecht University.

My research starts from a sustained interest in film style and the conditions that shape it. I study cinematography, lighting, color, camera movement, production design, and atmosphere, while asking how aesthetic choices emerge from specific technologies, production cultures, histories, and cultural concepts. Much of this work has developed through Indonesian and Southeast Asian cinema, but it has increasingly led me toward comparative questions across the Global South.

My first book, Film Style in Contemporary Indonesian Cinema, 1998–2018 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), examines how lighting, production design, and camera movement changed in Indonesian cinema after 1998. My current work on cinematic atmosphere develops this interest further through concepts such as rasa, visual darkness, and culturally situated ways of perceiving and describing audiovisual experience.

My current book project turns to Asian men, interracial intimacy, and screen visibility. Asian Men and Interracial Intimacy in Narrative Cinema, under contract with Edinburgh University Press, examines how Asian men have been positioned within interracial romantic and intimate narratives. This work is also being developed through my NWO-funded project, Visibly Invisible? Asian Men in Interracial Relationships in Dutch and Asian Audiovisual Archives, which combines archival research in the Netherlands and Southeast Asia with close analysis of audiovisual representation.

Another strand of my research concerns production cultures, informality, and collaborative filmmaking. I am interested in how films are made under conditions that do not fit dominant industrial models, and in the knowledge, values, and forms of cooperation that sustain such practices. My work on Wakaliwood in Uganda, for example, examines microbudget filmmaking through gotong royong and practices of collaborative, improvised production and preservation.

I also study the relationship between screen media, youth mental health, and wellbeing. This work examines how film, television, social media, and other audiovisual forms represent and mediate young people’s experiences of mental health, as well as the possibilities of using screen media to support reflection, discussion, and wellbeing.

Teaching is closely connected to these research interests. I am particularly interested in how students learn to analyse audiovisual form and how critical interpretation can be brought into productive dialogue with making. My pedagogical work focuses on audiovisual analysis, low-stakes creative exercises, the relationship between theory and practice, and the implications of generative AI for film and media education.

Across these projects, I keep returning to questions about how screen media acquire their aesthetic form, how they shape what and whom we see, how they intersect with people’s lived experiences, and how we learn to see and interpret audiovisual worlds.

I am a Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) and a member of the Utrecht Young Academy. Before joining Utrecht University, I held academic positions at the University of Oregon, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Groningen, and Utrecht University of Applied Sciences.