Martha is a visual anthropologist and filmmaker who explores the politics and poetics of storytelling after violence, war and ecological disaster. The questions animating her work: How do people create a world for themselves after violent conflicts and environmental destruction? What stories do they tell and to what audiences? And how can social anthropologists articulate aspects of human and other-than-human experiences through images and sounds? She explored such questions through ethnographic fieldwork in Latin America and, more recently, in Europe.
Her research practice involves developing experience-led approaches. She uses observational, participatory, collaborative, and co-creative methods in her filmmaking to explore the relationships and dynamics that shape the research encounter as well as people’s experiences within contemporary societies. Her research is situated in the disciplinary fields of memory and activism studies, indigenous media and emerging forms of engaged citizenship.
She has a PhD in Social Anthropology with visual media and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester; She completed a degree in Latin American Studies and a Mag.a in Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna. After her PhD, she held a postdoc position at the University of Bern. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, co-founder of CameraWise, and co-editor of the Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF).

Current research projects

• Just Art. Performing Multi-Species Justice in the Dutch Caribbean

The project ethnographically examines decolonial, multispecies theatre in the Dutch Caribbean, where rising sea levels threaten coastal land and biodiversity. Here, ‘multispecies justice’ means taking the interests of nonhuman beings—including animals, plants, forests, rivers, and ecosystems—seriously in claims for justice, and rethinking social, political, and legal systems accordingly. Together with partners such as Teatro KadaKen, the project develops artistic strategies that move beyond climate justice as a theme. It explores the politics of production and representation, while expanding performance spaces into sites for critical engagement with multispecies imaginaries.

• Memory Futures. Truth, Justice, and New Media

The project Memory Futures is an ethnographic exploration of VR and 360 video as collaborative tools to understand and share notions of truth and justice in the aftermath of war and conflict. We aim to connect the fields of memory and media studies through the lens of critical empiricism – a philosophical approach that emphasises knowledge derived from sensory experience, observation, and experimentation.

• Nature’s Rights in Europe: Frictions, Collisions and Transformative Potentials

In this project, we set out to study how Rights of Nature (RoN) initiatives change environmental activism in Europe. We look at three contemporary case studies to inspire conversations between anthropology, law and environmental activsm and their responses to current debates on climate change and related crises in Europe.

Research grants and honours

• Winter Foundation for the Rights of Nature prize in the category research article 2026

• Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film

• Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) - Seed Grant

• University of Amsterdam Starter Grant

Current collaborations

• Hamburger Institut for Sozialforschung (Dr. Laura Affolter)
• University of Kassel (Dr. Andreas Gutmann)
• Filmmaking for Fieldwork (Dr. Andy Lawrence)

Courses

• Bachelor courses in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology
• Master's courses in the Visual Anthropology track

PhD Supervision

• Leonie Dronkert 
• Annebel Huijboom
• Aladin Borioli
• Avery Franken
• Margarida Muralha Schweikert Farinha
• Rugun Sirait
• Albert Kuhn
• Mikayla Vieira Ribeiro

Articles

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia, Laura Affolter, Andreas Gutmann and Jenny García Ruales (2025) “Stories of Systemic Failure? Landscaping the Rights of Nature in Europe.” Journal of Legal Anthropology. Volume 8, Issue 1, Summer 2024: 46–76.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2024) “Becoming Community: Filmmakers crafting futures in an Andean town.” In: ‘Filming Futures. Future-making and Speculative Fiction in Ethnographic Film and Multimodal Practice’ by Anna-Lisa Ramella, Igor Karim and Steffen Köhn (eds). Anthrovision. Vol.10/1.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2023) “Our Cinema, our Stories, our Power: The politics of storytelling in contemporary Andean Cinema.” New Techno Humanities, Vol.3/1, 49-55.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2023) “The politics of visibility and visuality in camera-based research.” Trajectoria. Journal of the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. Vol.4, 1-26.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2020) “Doing time – visual notes on waiting without quite knowing for what exactly”, Entanglements. 3(2): 79–85.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2019) “Pursuing the Perpetual Conflict: Ethnographic Reflections on the Persistent Role of the ‘Terrorist Threat’ in Contemporary Peru.” History & Memory. Vol. 31 (1), pp. 59–86.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2019) “Poetic Visuality. An Essay on the Carceral Experience.” Visual Ethnography. Vol. 8, (2), pp. 143–154.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia, and Maria Eugenia Ulfe (2019) “Antropología Visual y ‘Activismo de la Memoria’ en el Perú.” Forma – Revista d’Estudis Comparatius. Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Vol 18 (spring), pp. 81–105.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia, and Maria Eugenia Ulfe (2018) “Counter Narratives: visual anthropology and ‘memory activism’ in Peru.” Anthrovision. Vol. 6 (2), pp. 1–23.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2018) “Activist Objects: the materiality and meaning of human remains in post-conflict Peru.” Writing with Light, Cultural Anthropology Website, January 22.

Dietrich Ortega, Martha-Cecilia (2009) “Insights to Indigenous Media and Collaborative Video Work.” Die Maske, Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie. Special Issue: Anthropologischer Film/Mai 2009, pp. 15–17

Dietrich Ortega, Martha-Cecilia (2007) “Indigene Repräsentation im ‘neuen’ Venezolanischen Fernsehen.” Austrian Studies in Social Anthropology, Sondernummer KSA-Tage 2007, pp. 3–17.

Dietrich Ortega, Martha-Cecilia (2006) “Überlebensfrage – Indigene Mitbestimmung.” Panorama, Lateinamerika Anders, Nr. 6.

Films

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2027) Unquiet Ground. Sixpackfilm

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2020) Horror in the Andes: Ayacuchean Cinema In-the-making. Journal of Anthropological Films, 4 (02).

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2018) Between Memories. A collaborative journey into the experience of memory in post-war Peru. Journal of Anthropological Films, Vol. 2 (2), e1559.

Book chapters

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2020) “Creative Precarity. Filmmaking between Creative Vision and Lived Realty.” In: Peruvian Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds by Cynthia Vich and Sarah Barrow (eds.), pp. 85-102.

Laura Coppens, Martha-Cecilia Dietrich and Michaela Schäuble (2019) “Audio-visual Anthropology.” In: Methoden ethnologischer Feldforschung, 3rd edition by Bettina Beer and Anika König (eds.). Berlin: Reimer Verlag, pp. 241-260.

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2017) “Dehumanizando – über die Konstruktion von Gerechtigkeit(en) fünfzehn Jahre nach Ende des internen bewaffneten Konflikts in Peru.” In: Gerechtigkeits-Gefühle: zur emotionalen Re-Formation nach Krisen und Konflikten by Zenka, Olaf and Jonas Bens (eds.). Berlin: Transkript Verlag, pp. 159–190.

Tiefenbacher, Kerstin and Martha-Cecilia Dietrich Ortega (2008) “Ethnographische Beobachtungen. Feldforschung in Leitersdorf.” In: Hosted. Ein Dorf als Performance-Raum. Vienna: Bucher Verlag.

Monographs & edited volumes

Lawrence, Andy and Martha-Cecilia Dietrich (2025) Empirical Art. Filmmaking For Fieldwork in Practice. Manchester University Press.

Dietrich Ortega, Martha-Cecilia (2010) Indigene Repräsentation im neuen venezolanischen Fernsehen. Saarbrücken: VDM.

Online articles / Blogs

Dietrich, Martha-Cecilia (2015) “When Truth Goes to Court: the shifting role of testimonies in post-conflict Peru.” Open Security Projects. 29 April.

Dietrich, Martha and Penny Harvey (2014) “Activist Objects and the Disappeared.” Curating the Activist Object, 30 June.

Exhibitions

Production and Curation for the photographic exhibition “From Muted Places: Objects of Resistance” commissioned by Soho in Ottakring Art Festival, Vienna. June 2020.