about
Brinnan Chantal Schill is a photographer, filmmaker, and researcher telling stories through audio-visual ethnography. Her artistic and research practices are shaped through her training as an anthropologist and her background in fine art photography. She creates her award-winning work through qualitative research, long form journalism, and immersive on-site fieldwork (see mugshot: a souvenir from a project documenting police use of tear gas at the 2020 protests in Portland, Oregon). Her research interests include the anthropology of environment, multispecies climate ethnography, food sovereignty, and religious/political ritual, using mediums of ethnographic filmmaking, wet collodion portraiture, documentary essays, soundscapes, and rotoscope animation.
Brinnan grew up eating boiled peanuts and fried okra in South Carolina before moving to the snowy mountains of Utah, where she earned a BFA in Photography and fell in love with tintypes. She has since lived in the Sonoran Desert making friction fires as a wilderness guide, worked as a pig midwife in Oregon, and perfected the art of cheesemaking in Tuscan countryside during a brief gig as a goatherd. In 2022, she moved to Manchester, where she now plays mandolin in a bluegrass-fusion band (The Pickadillers) and recently graduated with an MA degree in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology. Her dissertation research used collaborative filmmaking and multispecies ethnography to explore ecological interdependence and local experiences of climate change in Grenville, Grenada.
Master of Arts in Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester (2023)
Bachelor of Fine Arts Photography, Double-major in Sociocultural Anthropology with thesis. Minor in Art History (2020)