Karen Waltorp (DK) is Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, filmmaker and Head of the Ethnographic Exploratory and MultimodalLab. Her expertise is in multimodal and futures anthropology, and her thematic interests span digital media and emerging technologies; gender, migration and representation; energy and infrastructures. She is author of Why Muslim Women and Smartphones (2020), Energy Futures (2022), An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies (2023) Digital Sociality (2024), and Tech Imaginaries, Energy Crisis, and Everyday Lives in South Africa’s Silicon Cape (in press).

Waltorp has two decades of ethnographic fieldwork experience in South Africa and Denmark. She is Chair of the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant Panel for Social Sciences and Humanities and Principal Investigator of CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship (DFC) and DigiSAt (IRDF). Waltorp is CPH:LAB alumnae 2022-23 with Danish/Afghan Film Collective ARTlife. She has been visiting fellow at Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University (2020 + 2025), RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Lab (2018), University of California Berkeley (2016) and African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town (2006).