Emily Ridout, M.A., is OFN’s Interim Program Manager through July 2016. She holds a concurrent position as the Program Coordinator for the Confucius Institute for Global China Studies. Ridout has an MA in Folklore and a certificate in New Media and Culture from the University of Oregon where she filmed, edited, and produced documentary films on topics ranging from environmental tourism to the chemistry of effective birth control. Her research interests include intersections of culture and environment, poetics, foodways, documentary, and religion. While a graduate student intern and post-graduate fellow at OFN, Ridout worked on the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program and a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship nomination.
Ridout strives to develop and promote meaningful cultural programming in ways that are innovative, sustainable, and respectful. Before coming to the University of Oregon, Ridout led educational and adventure trips in the Fiji Islands, the Southern California mountains, Kentucky, and throughout the Midwest and Appalachia. When she is not working with cultural programming, she can be found teaching and practicing yoga, hiking, or writing what she hopes is the next great American novel.
Bruno Seraphin, Oregon Folklife Network’s Winter Fellow, is a folklorist, narrative and documentary filmmaker, and musician. Originally from Massachusetts, he earned a BFA in Film Production from New York University and lived in Appalachian North Carolina for several years, before moving to Eugene to complete an MA in Folklore Studies at the University of Oregon. His academic and professional interests include environmental justice, human-plant relationships, philosophies of place and space, anti-racist organizing, collaborative film-making, and the ways that social movements generate and use stories.
Seraphin produced and directed the award winning experimental independent film “If I Had Wings to Fly,” which explores traditional music and storytelling in Western North Carolina. It was featured at the Folklorists in the South conference in 2012. His newest documentary, “Year of the Possum: The Green Grass Cloggers’ 40th,” will premiere in 2016. Seraphin’s MA thesis, “Stories We Live: On the Hoop with Nomads of the Northwest,” is an ethnography of a grassroots network of nomadic, mostly white “rewilders.” His subjects use Indigenous ecological knowledge to harvest and replant wild foods in the Great Basin region of the United States, particularly northeastern Oregon. Seraphin’s thesis pays special attention to their land ethic and their interactions with Native groups.
During spring 2016, Seraphin will serve as a Project Coordinator for a series of collaborative documentary videos for the Museum of Natural and Cultural History and Oregon Tribes.