Photographer | Filmmaker | Visual Anthropologist

I was four when I made my first video: two blurry seconds of a plant and my mother, shot on one of the cameras my father brought home. He was a national television cameraman in Macedonia, and despite the scarcity that shaped much of our early life, we always had cameras, tapes, photographs. Memory was everywhere and ordinary things were recorded not because they were special, but because they were there. That instinct to notice, to keep, to document what might otherwise vanish shaped everything.

I grew up in Ohrid and Struga, facing the Ohrid Lake and the Black Drim River, in houses filled with extended family, political tension, homemade food, and the kind of care that’s both heavy and deeply rooted. I studied linguistics and digital arts, but photography was always the throughline, a way to look at people without looking away. Over time, my camera became a tool for listening. I began collecting gestures, rituals, quiet violences, and inherited grief, especially in the Balkans, where history seeps into everyday life.

I now work at the intersection of documentary film, photography, and visual anthropology. My work often blends contemporary portraits with archival materials, field recordings, and journal fragments, weaving together stories about migration, family, survival, and care. Some projects are long-term and deeply personal, like my grandmother’s living archive as she prepares for death. Others are urgent and political: street protests, displaced communities, cultural erasure. But in all of them, I’m drawn to the same thing: a way of seeing that preserves the ordinary before it disappears.

My work has been exhibited internationally and published in photography, documentary, and cultural outlets. I’ve collaborated with cultural institutions, NGOs, and media organizations across the region, including the Center for Ethnomusicological Activities (CED). I’ve led community workshops in photography and film, and I’m currently developing a solo exhibition and a photography book.

I’m open to residencies, commissions, and collaborations that resonate with a narrative, documentary, or research-based approach to image-making.

Based in Belgrade
Contact me for work, commissions, residencies, or to request my CV.

radmilavankoska@gmail.com