Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture (VisANTH) is an international program specialising in cross-cultural Indigenous and Asia-Pacific focused research. Established in 2008, this foundational program is one of only a few in Australia to support ethnographic and practice-led research as a basis for creative and critical research innovation in the arts.

Visual Anthropology brings together a diverse, dynamic community of scholars working across the broad fields of the humanities, the social sciences and the creative arts, from anthropologists and filmmakers to new media artists and curators.  The program specialises in field and site based research of high socio-cultural relevance, outreach and impact.  Researchers and postgraduate students may partner with community, local and/or industry organisations; undertake auto-ethnography, socially-engaged and participatory art practice, or other de-colonising approaches to practice-based aesthetic research.  Beyond the traditional focus on film, the program expands the field of visual anthropology to explore the significance of new post-documentary empiricism through embodied and sensory approaches to culture, including a focus on identity formations in Indigenous, displaced/diaspora and migratory aesthetics and communities; emerging social and cultural formations shaped by traditions in transformation; beyond-human animate life worlds; new ecological and political economies; and networks of global art and media.

The program hosts the Ethnographic Media Lab, a set of mobile field-kits and desktop editing interfaces, to promote and develop ethnographic and experimental documentary field-based production.