Mael Vizcarra is an anthropologist and filmmaker from Tijuana, Mexico. She earned her PhD in the Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, with a specialization in visual anthropology and border studies.
Her visual work explores the invisible forces that shape ordinary life and the liminality of everyday experience. Mael's most recent visual projects investigate what she terms the "aesthetics of the between" through media experiments centered on developing a digital phenomenology.
In her previous ethnographic work, Mael reframes debates around borders and mobility by focusing on the emplaced sensory and affective experiences of working people's bodies, as they labor, perform, and circulate across the Mexico-U.S. border.
Currently, Mael is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona and a research associate at UC Santa Cruz as part of the European Research Council-funded project FOODCIRCUITS. She is leading the California Strawberries Circuit, studying the embodied production, transportation, and consumption of berries in the U.S. This project traces the movement of strawberries through the hands that cultivate, the arms that transport, and the mouths that consume them, to reveal the connections between workers and society at large.