Aida Vallejo is associate professor at University of the Basque Country (Spain), where she teaches documentary film theory and practice, and narrative theory. She is former research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at University of Edinburgh.
Her expertise relates to creative documentary and film festivals, having worked in these fields as a critic, scriptwriter, consultant, researcher and lecturer.
Aida has co-edited the books Documentary Film Festivals Vol.1 and Vol.2 and Film Festivals and Anthropology as well as several academic articles (about documentary film, film festivals, narratology, creative industries and ethnography/anthropology of media), and writes reviews of documentary films and film festivals on Zine Dokumentala.
Film Historian (PhD, Autonomous Universisty of Madrid), and documentary expert (MA, Autonomous University of Barcelona), she holds degress in Socio-cultural Anthropology (UNED) and Audiovisual Communication (University of the BAsque Country, UPV/EHU).
She writes and teaches in English, Spanish and Basque, and speaks French, Italian and Modern Greek.
Aida is the founder and coordinator of the Documentary workgroup of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) and principal investigator of ikerFESTS research project, which maps film festivals in the Basque context.
Visiting scholar at University of Edinburgh (research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), St Andrews University and University of Glasgow (Scotland); FAMU (Prague); Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic); Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece).
Member of selection commitees for the San Sebastian International Film Festival documentary co-production forum and Cine Invisible Human Rights Film Festival. Moderator of the Bilbao’s documentary festival forum Zinebi Networking.
She has served on the juries and offered seminars and talks at several international festivals.
Coordinator of the Spanish delegation of the European Film Academy’s university award. https://www.eufa.org/