Jón Bjarki Magnússon

Biography: Jón Bjarki Magnússon is a visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker with a background in journalism. He studied creative writing at the University of Iceland and received his MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität, Berlin, in 2018. His award-winning projects include journalism on the conditions of refugees and asylum-seekers in Iceland, and ethnographic films exploring themes such as the later life course, biomedical categorizations, death, technology, and friendship in cyberspace. A recipient of the German International Ethnographic Film Festival’s Manfred Krüger Awards for ‘Excellent Camera Work’ and the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Short Film Prize for ‘the most outstanding short film on social, cultural and biological anthropology or archaeology’, Magnússon is currently an ADVANCE CRT researcher at Maynooth University, where he is working on a multimodal ethnographic Ph.D. research situated near the intersection of anthropology and technology, more precisely on the social connections of older adults in online virtual worlds.

Supervisors: Dr. David Prendergast (Maynooth University) and Dr. Linzi Ryan (Maynooth University)