Nick Sturdee

Nick is a British documentarist, journalist, and writer who has reported on culture and social transformation across the former USSR since 1991.
He has travelled to Ukraine since the 1990s and made 12 films in the country for the BBC and Channel 4. He met the full-scale war in Hostomel and its early weeks on the southern front.
He has contributed regularly to BBC radio and podcast coverage of Russia's war against Ukraine, while also working in Chechnya and elsewhere in the North Caucasus, where he has documented the emergence of post-Soviet identities. His work includes films on Russian activity in the Middle East and Africa.
He holds a PhD in post-Soviet film and is interested in how the invasion of Ukraine is represented in Western, Ukrainian, and Russian media, including social media.
He spent time in Odessa both before and during the full-scale invasion and looks forward to returning to make a film and write about its transformation over the four years of war. He will explore questions of language, identity, and how its residents understand the city’s history and possible future.

Christine Hamel

Christine is a German radio and television journalist with Germany’s public broadcasting network ARD. She has over twenty-five years of experience reporting on politics, society, and conflict.
Since 2014, she has covered Russia’s war against Ukraine in depth, producing numerous features on its political, cultural, and human dimensions. Based in Munich and trained in political science and European studies, her work traces how war reshapes public life, memory, and everyday experience. In Odessa, she will develop new reporting on the city’s lived reality under war—its atmosphere, voices, and the textures of resilience and change.

Matthew Porges

Matthew Porges is an anthropologist and writer based in Oxford. He has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development (ODID) and Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), and at the Institute of European Studies and International Relations (IESIR), Comenius University, in Bratislava. 
His research interests span social movements, political ecology, and migration. He is interested in how people make sense of mobility and change, how they pursue political goals, and how they respond to the behaviour of the states in which they live or move. He has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in North Africa and Central/Eastern Europe. 
His research has been supported by the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Slovak Research and Innovation Authority, among other funders. During the residency, Matthew will examine social movements under conditions of armed conflict.