Mo Scarpelli, Southern New Hampshire University Fellow, is a director and cinematographer of non-fiction cinema. Her feature-length films include Anbessa (Berlinale International Film Festival Crystal Bear and Glashütte Documentary Prize nominee), El Father Plays Himself (Visions du Réel Special Mention for Best International Film), and Frame by Frame (SXSW 2015). She spent her New America fellowship directing and producing Refugee, a documentary transmedia project that unpacks the refugee experience in America, examines the social construction of the term ‘refugee,’ and examines how and where refugees fit into the contemporary American social fabric.
Scarpelli’s short films and cinematography, photography, and writing have been published with the New Yorker, the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and Africa Review. Scarpelli has experience filming in more than 25 countries, including Venezuela, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia during political unrest; her films focus on the cold violence of these spaces, as well as the rupture of identity by exterior circumstances, and the ways a human copes in order to survive. Scarpelli is a selection of Berlinale Talents, has received fellowships from New America and the International Women in Media Foundation, and holds a Bachelor’s of Journalism from the University of Missouri (USA).