Aída Vallejo
She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), with accreditation for Full Professorship. She holds a PhD in Film History (Autonomous University of Madrid, cum laude, International Mention), a Master’s degree in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary (Autonomous University of Barcelona), and Bachelor’s degrees in Audiovisual Communication (UPV/EHU) and Social and Cultural Anthropology (UNED). She writes and teaches in English, Basque, and Spanish, and speaks French, Modern Greek, and Italian. Her technical skills in the audiovisual field (such as video recording and editing, graphic design, web design, and database design) are key to collaboration in the development of the Atmósfera laboratory (created in 2024), one of GAIT’s core research lines.
She is an expert in film festivals and documentary cinema with an international profile, supported by her participation in numerous research networks and international conferences, research stays at foreign universities, archives, film institutes, and international festivals, as well as her internationally impactful publications (with publishers such as Palgrave Macmillan, Amsterdam University Press, and L’Harmattan, and in high-impact academic journals such as Studies in European Cinema and Arte, Individuo y Sociedad).
She is Deputy Director for Internationalization and Communication at the UPV/EHU Doctoral School. She is part of the management team together with the co-Principal Investigator of the present research group, where they develop strategies for the internationalization of postgraduate studies through international agreements and cotutelle arrangements, collaborating with consortia such as Enlight and Euskampus. In addition, together with the co-PI, she has published studies on women’s supervision of doctoral theses. Since 2023, she has been an elected member of the editorial committee of the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies, the largest film studies association in Europe, and is the founder and coordinator of the Documentary Workgroup (2009–2025).
She is the Principal Investigator of three research projects: (1) IkerFESTS (on film and audiovisual festivals in the Basque context, funded by the UPV/EHU); (2) Encuentros en el Zinemaldia (funded by the Gipuzkoa Provincial Council for the study of the historical archive of the San Sebastián International Film Festival); and (3) IDFmap (on documentary film institutes worldwide, developed at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and funded by the Basque Government and IASH).