Ina Karkani studied American English and French Studies (MA)in Heidelberg and Stuttgart University. She post-graduated in English Literature and Culture at Aristotle University, Greece and Cinema Studies at the Cinema Department of Stockholm University, Sweden. Since October 2021 Ina works with her doctoral project ‘Ontological Drifting in Contemporary Animal Cinema’ as a scientific researcher in the interdisciplinary GRK Normativity, Critique and Change at FU-Berlin.

Ina works as a film curator for the Section Generation at Berlin International Film Festival - Berlinale on a part-time basis. She contributed as jury member at Frames, Portuguese Film Festival (edition 2020) and worked for Stockholm International Film Festival.

SIS International School, Stockholm, Sweden

English Language and Culture, Private and State Junior/High Schools, Greece

The project “Ontological Drifting in Contemporary Animal Cinema” addresses viewing experiences in recent cinema that feature aspects of animality. Thinking of films as active agents that enter into communication with their audience, a corpus of recent works are explored in relation to how their film aesthetics offer ways to rethink corporeality, embodiment and modern subjectivity in images that blur the ontological boundaries between what can be perceived as human and animal. For this, contemporary phenomenological studies enter into dialogue with animal film studies and hermeneutical discourses on the normativity of the body. Leading research questions that guide this project are: What initiates the depicted human and non-human bodies as text? How do we gain out of such cinematic enactments insight about our emotional engagement with human and non-human worlds? In which ways does it reflect but also undermine normative viewing practices within (animal) cinema?

Further Research Interests:

• Native and Indigenous Studies
• Animal and Feminist Eco-Critical Studies
• Cinema of the Body
• Reception Theory
• Media and Culture
• Memory and Nostalgia Studies

Karkani, Ina, (2022) “Bodies Out Of Place: Ontological Adriftness in The Lobster” in: The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos. Films, Form, Philosophy, ed. Eddie Falvey, London: Bloomsbury.

Karkani, Ina, (2019) “Bergman’s Women, Female Gender Representation in Summer With Monika, Persona and Scenes From A Marriage” in: Film International, Vol.17, No.1., 50-56.

Karkani, Ina (2016), “Aesthetics of Recession: Urban Space and Identity in Attenberg and Beautiful Youth” in: Journal of Greek Media and Culture, 2:2, pp.201-216, Bristol: UK, 201-216.

Karkani, Ina, (2015), "Framing the Weird Body in Contemporary European Cinema", in: The Funambulist Papers, Volume 2, ed. Léopold Lambert, New York: Punctum Books & Center of Transformative Media.