Meet the team

Melissa Nolas is co-Director of the Children’s Photography Archive; she is an academic, writer, and accidental archivist who brought her first camera when she was nine and has been taking photographs ever since. She writes on affect, archives, bodies, childhood, gender, health, memories, participation, publics, photography and sound; she is happiest mucking about with creative and multimodal research methods, and creating publics for research through exhibitions and catalogue writing. You can read more about her research here. Outside of academia, Melissa worked for a number of years in a service development and evaluation role for a national children’s mental health charity and, for a short period of time, in Press and PR, where she never quite mastered the art of writing a press release but had lots of fun trying. She lives in London with her family, and when not working she can be found walking her dog, swimming, and tending her tomato plants.

Christos Varvantakis is co-Director of the Children’s Photography Archive. He trained with world-leading professor of anthropology of education, Prof Christoph Wulf and obtained his PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin. He has over 10-years experience researching children and youth, visual cultures and multimodal research methodologies, and has worked on large EU-funded projects, as a researcher and a project coordinator for the EU Marie-Curie funded ‘DIGITMED (Global Perspectives on Learning and Development with Digital Media)’, as a researcher for the ERC funded ‘Connectors Study’ and as a co-investigator for the ERC funded ‘Children’s Photography Archive’. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, co-edited two books and two scientific journal special issues, and he regularly contributes to scientific blogs and press. He has a strong record of public engagement activities, has co-curated exhibitions that cut across the arts and social sciences and has co-produced over 50 ethnographic films. He is the Head of Programming at the ‘Athens Ethnographic Film Festival (Ethnofest)’ and a co-editor of the journal ‘entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography’.

The work of the Children’s Photography Archive is supported by an international advisory group who meet once a year.

Konstantinos Aivaliotis holds a PhD in Social and Visual Anthropology and two postgraduate degrees, on the Anthropology of Education and “Sciences de l’ éducation” (France, university Rouen) and on Visual Anthropology (England, Goldsmiths College). Among his interests are the Film Festivals, Film Markets and their multidimensional role within the film industry, documentary, ethnographic cinema and multimodal ethnography. He is a graduate of the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University. From 2008 to 2016 he was a programmer at the Athens International Film Festival ‘Opening Nights’, and from 2017-2020 he served as Director of Promotion at the Greek Film Centre. Today he is a producer of documentaries, the director and a founding member of Ethnofest organization along with the titular festival and finally he is postdoctoral researcher at University of Aegean.

Jose Bellido is Reader in Law at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. He is the Spanish national editor of Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) an online archive curated by Lionel Bently & Martin Kretschmer. He is particularly interested in the history of intellectual property law and has additional research interests in legal theory, evidence, and legal history. His recent book projects are Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law (Hart Publishing, 2017) and Adventures in Childhood. Intellectual Property, Imagination and the Business of Play (Cambridge University Press, 2022), co-authored with Kathy Bowrey.

Itza A. Carbajal is New Orleans born Texas raised American doctoral student pursuing a PhD in Information Science at the University of Washington Information School focusing on children and their records. Carbajal’s proposed dissertation research analyzes how records embody childhood trauma as well as how archival records may provide release or relief from traumatic memories. Previously, she worked as the Latin American Metadata Librarian for LLILAS Benson at the University of Texas Austin. She received a Master of Science in Information Studies from UT Austin and dual-degree Bachelor of Arts in History and English with a concentration on creative writing and legal studies from UT San Antonio.

Rebecca Coleman is Professor of Digital Futures in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol, UK. Throughout her career, she has worked with image-based methodologies (sketching and drawing, collaging, photography, video-making) to explore and understand people’s sensory, embodied and affective experiences of media. This has included projects on: young women’s understandings their bodies; adult professionals’ and young people’s feelings about digital media, social media and time; and adult and young people’s experiences of changing rhythms, routines and imaginations of the future during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is now especially interested in the kinds of futures imagined by people who aren’t usually involved in the design and implementation of digital technologies. Before moving to Bristol, she worked at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Alice Corble (she/her) is a library and archival scholar, educator, service provider, and activist, with over 12 years’ professional experience across academic, public, and radical libraries. With an interdisciplinary academic background in sociology, cultural studies, literature, and philosophy, Alice has developed expertise in the hidden infrastructures, ideologies and practices of library spaces, collections, and social relations; with a focus on how libraries and archives are structured, instituted, and experienced via uneven power dynamics and learning practices. She is currently based at the University of Sussex Library where she teaches critical information literacy and is undertaking an AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice fellowship researching the role of Sussex Library and archives in the university’s (post)colonial origins, development, and aspirations. Alice is also Editorial Coordinating Manager and co-founder of the Critical Race Theory Collective (CRTc), an international community of scholars, practitioners and activists working at the intersections of race, libraries, archives, and education. Alice lives in Brighton and is happiest when swimming in the sea in all seasons, and likes the way being beside or in the sea helps her to maintain a childlike curiosity about the world.

Gabriella Giannachi (FRSA, MAE) is Professor in Performance and New Media, and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technologies at the University of Exeter. Her research interest are in art and technology; mobile interpretation and user-generated documentation of art and sport events; the creation, exhibition, and sharing of archival resources within an exhibition context; mixed, augmented and virtual reality; presence research; museum studies and digital curation; new media and digital curation; oral history and digital heritage; creative technologies and public humanities. 

Hyo Yoon Kang is a Reader in Law at the University of Warwick, UK. Previously she was Lecturer of Science Studies at the University of Lucerne and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She is particularly interested in knowledge practices, their materialities and political economies. Drawing upon anthropological and media theoretical works, she writes on intellectual property,  political economy of knowledge, history of sciences, and law, culture and the humanities.

Ioanna Noula (PhD) is a childhood and digital citizenship expert. She is Senior Leader of Operations at the Internet Commission, a non-profit organisation that advances the accountability of online platforms evaluating their practices and governance of user-generated content moderation. She leads research in the area of corporate digital responsibility and her current work focuses on the subject of corporate citizenship and ethical business governance in the digital age. She has previously worked in Higher Education as a researcher at the UCL-Institute of Education, the University of Leeds and LSE’s Department of Media and Communications where she is a Visiting Fellow since 2016.

Jane Joo Park is a doctoral student in strategic management at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management (Germany) where she is researching the role of diversity and inclusion and the influence of social movements in organizational strategy. She has extensive experience in philanthropy as both a professional fundraiser and fundraising consultant working with an array of organizations in the arts, education, humanitarian aid, and international NGOS among others. A long-time novice photographer, she is the mother of three children and lives with her family in Essen, Germany.

Annebella Pollen is Professor in Visual and Material Culture at University of Brighton, UK, where she researches histories of art, craft, design and dress. She a particular interest in photography and has published widely on amateur practices, photographic competitions, photographic publishing and the photographic industry; her books include Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life(Routledge 2015) and the essay collections Reconsidering Amateur Photography (National Media Museum 2014, co-edited with Juliet Baillie) and Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (Routledge 2018, co-edited with Ben Burbridge). She was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2021, which she is using to prepare a new book and exhibition on the history of photography by children.

Claire Prater is an experienced Project Manager, she has worked on many UK, European and international projects and events with various companies including Royal Mail International, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the University of Sussex. During her time at University for Sussex Claire was the project coordinator for the Connectors Study (2014- 2017) enjoying her time on this challenging and varied project. Claire now works for the European Social Work Research Association, she is directly responsible for the day-to-day management of the Association as well as supporting and organising various elements of ESWRA including the Board, Committees and the Seminar series as well as providing support and advice for the yearly European Conference for Social Work Research. Claire lives in Hove, UK, with her two children, well young adults, two elderly cats and a very unruly garden. She enjoys swimming in the sea …. in the summer!

Johannes Schoening is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, where he leads the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group. At the School of Computer Science, where he is based, he and his colleagues offer an innovative modern computer science curriculum with contents from Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation that is unique in Europe. With their research, they want to empower individuals and communities with the information they need to make better data-driven decisions by developing novel and empowering user interfaces with them. They focus on a broad range of use cases from geographic information science, public health, and medical contexts, as well as extreme conditions such as space missions. Johannes loves to work in interdisciplinary teams to create novel insights.