Niedźwiedź, Anna
is an ethnographer and cultural anthropologist. She currently works as an Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University. Her ethnographic research focuses primarily on the various ways people live and experience their religions, with particular emphasis on the issue of embodied knowledge, the senses and the anthropology of the body. Experiencing sounds and space, the human voice and its various cultural forms, its relations with rituals are areas where she brings together anthropological research and musical practice. In her artistic projects she explores singing and working with the voice and other sounds that co-create dynamic spatial assemblages. Together with composer Ewa Trębacz and horn player Josiah Boothby, she has undertaken spatial-sound recording sessions in Poland and the USA. The results of these sessions have been presented at art festivals, including the Warsaw Autumn with a live musical layer performed by her (2009), the Audio Art Festival and Musica Polonica Nova in Wrocław (2022). She is also interested in the performative aspects of sacred music in various European traditions, as well as in African religious and ritual soundscapes where she draws on ethnographic research undertaken in Ghana since 2009.