Darcy Alexandra is an anthropologist, author, and filmmaker known for her insightful storytelling and inspirational teaching. She studied filmmaking at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, digital storytelling with StoryCenter, and holds a Ph.D. in visual anthropology from the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland. Her photo-film NOWHERE ANYHOW screened at Aspen Summer Words, marking the beginning of her experimentation with the photo film genre. Her poems on violence, migration, and memory earned first place in ethnographic poetry from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology in 2018, establishing her position as an innovative scholar. She has been an invited poet at prestigious workshops including Tin House and Community of Writers. Her co-creative films have screened at film festivals, conferences and exhibitions in Europe and the Americas, and she has given keynotes and masterclasses at the University of Amsterdam, Manchester University, and the University of Lisbon, among others. Recognized as a leader in community-based filmmaking, she has mentored emerging voices in first-person narrative since 2007, collaborating with organizations such as the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Eritreischer Medienbund.

In 2017, Alexandra began her association with the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, first as a visiting lecturer and then as a Swiss National Science Foundation researcher (2019-2024) and member of the media anthropology unit, Ethnographic Media Space Bern. Her research and teaching interests include audiovisual landscape ethnography, hydro-social relations, surveillance and border studies, ethnographic poetry, critical Indigenous theory, the politics of voice and listening, embodied narratives of exile, Latin American cinema, movements for racial, social and environmental justice, and migration activism. Over the course of her academic career she has conducted participatory, ethnographic, and audiovisual research in the US-Mexico Borderlands, El Salvador, Uruguay, Cuba, and Ireland.

Alexandra’s current book project, “Entre Rios: Surveillance and Futurity in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” explores the Sonoran Desert borderlands as a pivotal site for examining contesting theories of futurity. Set against the backdrop of necropolitical policies of deterrence—marked by extensive surveillance infrastructure and mining extraction—this project documents ecological practices of care as a ‘politics of otherwise’ during a time of accelerating democratic erosion. Through landscape ethnography, audiovisual portraiture and ethnographic poetry, the research engages with ‘a border multiple’ in which environmental stewards and citizen scientists are deploying innovative technologies to safeguard and repair vital water sanctuaries and migration corridors in one of the most biologically diverse ecological networks in the Americas.

Her lifelong commitment to human and civil rights is rooted in her experience as a survivor of childhood domestic violence and in her diverse collaborations in the Americas where she organized with Indigenous, anti-racist, Chicanx/Latine, and queer activists and coordinated national solidarity delegations to El Salvador between 1989-1994. Together with her beloved friend Ralph Sprenkels, she worked as an investigator with the Salvadoran Association in Search of Disappeared Children (Pro Búsqueda) between 1994-1998. In 1998, she moved to the Sonoran Desert where she worked as an adult educator at Pima Community College. In Tucson, she completed graduate studies in the anthropology of education at the University of Arizona with mentors Luis C. Moll, Laura Briggs, Norma Mendoza Denton, and Julio Cammarota.

Darcy is an adoptee and grew up in the South San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, she lives in Zurich with her spouse, sound engineer and and documentary filmmaker, Reto Stamm.