Staff

Anuj Vaidya is the Communications Director for Imagining America. He brings over two decades of experience in media and community-engaged art practice, arts education, and public scholarship. Vaidya has a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis. He received his MFA in Film/Video/New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002), and his BHA (Bachelors in Humanities and Arts) in English/Theater from Carnegie Mellon University (1997).

Vaidya began his work in education at Street-Level Youth Media, a Chicago-based non-profit that sought to train youth from low-income and immigrant communities in the media arts, as tools for activism and self-expression. During his tenure at the Pacific Film Archive (at UC Berkeley), he helped create the CineFiles database, an image and text archive related to global moving image culture, and trained K-16 educators on the integration of film and film-related materials into the humanities curriculum.

Currently a board member for 3rd i Films, the oldest South Asian media arts outfit in the US, Vaidya was co-director of the organization from 2006-2018. His own eco-media practice pays due attention to the material, social, and intellectual impacts of our storytelling and media technologies, reminding us that we must be attentive to both the footprint and the brain-print of the stories we tell. He is currently one of the content producers for Apex-Express, which airs on Berkeley’s KPFA 94.1 community radio station. Through this platform, he has been able to amplify stories of indigenous forest communities in Bombay (India) who are facing the threat of displacement and erasure from the onslaught of development. Similarly, his work with the YoloSol Collective cultivates place-based civic engagement and learning about issues of environmental and racial justice in Yolo county, and uplifts the work of Wintun culture-bearer Diana Almendariz.

Contact Anuj at anuva@ucdavis.edu