Amanda Belantara

Amanda Belantara is an audiovisual artist-anthropologist and librarian. She aspires to cultivate community and social change through creative exchange. Prior to joining NYU, Belantara worked as a creative producer and teaching artist, collaborating with cultural heritage institutions in New York and the UK to create interactive audio installations, audio tours, and oral history projects. Her work incorporates sound recordings to uncover aural perspectives that are often missing from written historical and contemporary works. Belantara is co-founder of the artist collective, Kinokophone. Kinokophone collects and composes sounds, stories and imagery from around the world. Kinokophone take their name from the Japanese word for mushroom. Mushrooms are a product of intricate connections that lie beyond the surface, with roots in folklore and imaginary worlds, much like the work we produce.  The name Kinokophone encapsulates what we like to do, which is to record and communicate ideas with an unaffected sense of wonder for what is growing up around us, unearthing the intertwining connections that lie beneath the surface.