The anthropologist and filmmaker, Asen Balikci has been an innovator in the field of ethnographic film and film in education for many years. Educated in francophone Switzerland, Professor Balikci obtained a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. From 1957 to 1965 he conducted fieldwork with the Netsilik Eskimos of the Canadian Arctic Coast resulting in a series of 12 films on traditional lifestyles (1968) that were broadcast by a multitude of international television stations. From 1963 to 1966 he was a senior scientist in the Man: A Course of Study Program (Education Development Center, Newton, Mass.) The field of human ecology in arctic and arid zones, already present in the Netsilik Eskimo films, appears again in The Sons of Haji Omar (1978), a much regarded study of nomadism and rural life among Pashtoon pastoralists in Afghanistan, in collaboration with Timothy Asch.

From 1989 to 1991 Professor Balikci made a number of field trips to Siberia where he shot Chronicle of Sereniki (1989) and initiated a program for teaching visual anthropology centered on the Khazim River Ostyak of Western Siberia. From 1992 until 1998 he worked on a research project on inter-ethnic relations in Southwest Bulgaria, and on the culture of poverty in post-socialist Bulgaria, while teaching visual anthropology in multicultural settings.

Asen Balikci is the author of numerous publications in English, French, and Bulgarian, which center on the topics of the ethnography of the peoples of the Arctic Coast, pastoralism in general, and visual anthropology. He was co-chairman of the Program in Ethnographic Film (PIEF), from 1966-1968, chairman of the Commission on Visual Anthropology, from 1983-1993, associate editor of Visual Anthropology (1986-1993), and editor of CVA Review (1986-1993). Among various academic positions Balikci held a chair as a professor of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal from which he retired in 1994. When he retired from his academic post, he moved back to his home country of Bulgaria to apply his media skills to facilitate communication and education both inside and outside the country.

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