Robert F. Byrnes
Russian and East European Institute

Ilya Utekhin is an anthropologist working in anthropology of technology, medical anthropology, and in the study of talk-in-interaction. From 1996 to 2022, he taught in the Department of Anthropology, European University at St.Petersburg. He is co-curator of the Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life: Communal Living in Russia, which contains ethnographic materials on on Soviet and post-Soviet urban housing, also reflected in his monograph Essays on the Communal Everyday Life  (Moscow 2001, 2004, in Russian). In 2017-20, Ilya was founder and CEO of a news aggregator service that showed two alternative agendas: official Russian media vs independent media. Ilya is the author of a number of documentary films. In Fall 2022, as a Visiting Scholar at Boston University, he worked with the materials of the Maya Deren Collection in Howard Gotlieb Archival Center. His recent book, Visual Anthropology: A Guide to Ethnographic Film (In Russian), is about the history of ethnographic filmmaking. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute during 2023.