Toma Peiu is a filmmaker, visual artist, and scholar-educator with an ethnographic practice in documentary, fiction and installation. His work has been presented, published or exhibited in over 150 venues on five continents, from multiplex cinemas to churches, and from congress halls to television stations, teahouses and community centers; from film festivals to art galleries and academic conferences; and from peer-reviewed journals to neighborhood bulletin boards. He holds degrees from the National University of Drama and Film in Bucharest and The New School in New York. Peiu’s research looks at people and events on the fringes of society: human migration, forced relocation, state and corporate surveillance, alternate lifestyles on the edge of capitalism and their relation to liminal place-making. His dissertation in Critical Media Practices looks at post-socialist imaginaries of migration from Central Eurasia. For this work, he has spent time between New York’s Central Asian diaspora and the Qaraqalpaq-Qazaq bordelands of Central Eurasia. Peiu is affiliated with the Melikian Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Arizona State University, and the Mimesis Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a co-founder of production company Root Films; and a founding member of the Entangled Films Collective in Munich.
The material afterlives of boom and bust in the US Southwest