Dr. Kate Hennessy

I am a Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. I am a settler scholar of Irish and German descent and an anthropologist, artist, and curator with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.

As the director of the Making Culture Lab, my research explores the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives in the context of technoscience. My collaborative  multimedia and research-creation artworks investigate documentary methodologies to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space. I am a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective, which curated exhibitions and projects at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art from 2009-2019.  Curation and the use of participatory media production as a method for curation is central to my work. Today I also work closely with artist-anthropologist Trudi Lynn Smith as the art-anthropology collaborative practice Pairatext.

I am honoured to have been recognized for my work and collaborations. I was a Trudeau Doctoral Scholar (2006-2010), and in 2008, I was part of a team who received the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Jean Rouch Award for Collaborative Ethnography (for Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs); in 2015, the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective was awarded the Council for Museum Anthropology’s Michael Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology. In 2017, I was awarded the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC’s Early in Career Award, which recognizes the contributions to the non-academic community made by faculty members who are at an early point in their careers. In 2019 I was awarded the Simon Fraser University Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology’s Research Excellence Award for Participatory and Collaborative Research and in 2021 received FCAT’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Visit my SFU Faculty Page

My Teaching Portfolio (password required)

Check out the Below the Radar podcast (recorded November 2024)

Recent Courses

Moving Images (IAT344)

  • Reviews and consolidates the fundamentals of digital video production, including camera and composition skills, the role of sound, lighting, and continuity and montage editing. Students will review and analyze works from traditional cinema and from contemporary digital video. The course will reinforce fundamental skills and extend the student's abilities to use a range of digital production, post-production, and presentation techniques. Collaboration with local museums and cultural organizations is a focus of our projects.

Science, Technology & Culture (IAT803)

  • Introduces the core values of interdisciplinary scholarship through engagement with history, theory and practice in the study of science, technology, society and culture. This course will be a reading-intensive, extended seminar style investigation of theoretical and historical references in science and technology studies and broader societal implications of technologies.

Graduate Research Colloquium (IAT805)

  • Through an interdisciplinary speaker series, presents research topics relevant to the SIAT graduate program. Engages students in discussion and debate on the utility, results and methods of research. Graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis.