Mette Hjort is Chair Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Mette is an Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle and an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Modern European Studies, University of Copenhagen. Previous appointments include Head of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, Director of Cultural Studies/Film and Communications at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Professor of Intercultural Studies at Aalborg University in Denmark. Mette was a Visiting Researcher at Kyoto University in 1996, a Visiting Professor of Scandinavian Studies at University College London in the Spring of 2007 and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Film Studies at St Andrews University in Scotland during the Fall of 2007. She has contributed regularly to the University of Washington’s Scan-Design-funded summer school in Copenhagen, where she has introduced students to the Zentropa-initiated film town in Avedoere, the film school, key cultural policy figures, and various filmmakers, scriptwriters, editors, and producers. Mette is particularly interested in understanding the implications of scale for various endeavors, cinematic and other. Much of her research in recent times has focused on the cinema of small nations, with a special emphasis on practitioners’ agency, creativity under constraint, artistic projects as alternatives or complements to cultural policy, gift culture and alternatives to zero-sum reasoning, and milieu-building or capacity-building initiatives involving transnational partnerships based on shared values and aspirations. Mette is currently pursuing work on film schools, focusing on partnerships between practitioners in the Nordic region and filmmakers in West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East. She is also involved in research in the area of environmental aesthetics, with reference to specific challenges arising in the context of intense urban development. A third line of research focuses on contemporary documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong and the PRC.

Environmental aesthetics, collaborative creativity and creativity under constraint, gift culture, transnational cinema, small national cinemas, philosophy and film, contemporary documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong and the PRC, practice-based film education and the building of sustainable communities, knowledge transfer and community engagement.