Vincenzo Cavallo, also known as Dr.Faras in East Africa, is an academic researcher a visual artist and a social entrepreneur.

He has been nominated Berlinale Talent in 2018, in 2019 he won the Berlinale Talent Co-Production Award with the Somali-Kenyan feature film project Bufis, currently under development. During the same here he has been selected to present African Space Makers, the first ever interactive VR series produced in Africa at the Venice Biennale Cinema (Gap-Financing Market), currently under production.

Vincenzo is the founder of the Nairobi BUS an iconic space in Nairobi where during 2018/19 more than 42 workshops on photography and videography have been delivered in collaboration with Canon Central and Norther Africa.

He is the director of an awarded feature film WAZI?FM, a TV series Pasos de Cumbia, a web series Connection House, and more than fifty documentaries on social political cultural and humanitarian issues.

In 2010, after working for UN/DESA and co-founding the Cultural Video Foundation and Cultural Video Production, he obtained a PhD in Communication and New Technologies with a thesis on participatory media and politics in Kenya.

Since 2007, he has been working in Africa especially in Kenya and Somalia and Latin America, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Chile with the Cultural Video Group producing and directing video projects and communication campaigns for UN agencies while at the same time publishing articles and book chapters on ICT for development and democracy.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Migration Studies.