Overview
Rediet Negede Lewi is an aspiring medical-visual anthropologist. She is originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and has lived in six countries across three continents. Her transnational life has been key in igniting her passion for anthropology. Rediet’s research interest centers on immigrant mental health – with a particular focus on the Ethiopian immigrant community in the DC, Maryland, Virginia (DMV) area. She aims to explore the effects of migration related stress; the difference between immigrants’ conceptualizations of distress and the Western biomedical model of mental illness; as well as the cultural, structural, and financial barriers to immigrant healthcare.
Rediet makes ethnographic films as part of her commitment to public anthropology. She is primarily interested in using ethnofiction and experimental media production methods to convey her characters’ internal experiences through an embodied visual representation. Rediet is also concerned with the ethics and politics of representing distress on the screen. She is committed to investigating the power differential between media makers and the subjects they seek to represent. Accordingly, she is a proponent of community co-creation in filmmaking. She believes film has the power to humanize an often misunderstood and stigmatized group of people.
Rediet earned her BA in Psychology from College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota and her first MA in Medical Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, United Kingdom. She recently graduated with an MA in Film and Media Production from American University in Washington, DC. She draws from the psychobiology of distress as well as rich qualitative data about immigrant life to portray the characters featured in her research and her films.
Personal/Media Portfolio Website: