Jamie Chambers is filmmaker, curator and film theorist.

He is the director of the award-winning films Blackbird (drama, 90, 2013) - nominated for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film (EIFF, 2013), a Scottish BAFTA, an AHRC Research In Film Award (2018), and winner of ‘Best Narrative Feature’ at Catskills Mountains Film Festival and ‘Best International Feature’ at Laughlin Film Festival - and When the Song Dies (documentary, 15min, 2014) - winner of the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Busan Film Festival, 2013. He is currently working on an experimental documentary about oral storytelling in Scotland (Mysterious Object, in production).

His research into the emergent possibilities of a folk cinema has been published in the world’s leading film studies journals (Screen (2018, 2023), JCMS (2021), Transnational Screens (2021), Open Screens (2022), Cineaste (2022)) and has been awarded an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (Towards a Global Folk Cinema, 2022-2024).

Arising from this research into a folk cinema, he is founder and curator of the Folk Film Gathering - the world’s first film festival (www.folkfilmgathering.com) - and in this capacity has hosted discussions with filmmakers such as John Sayles, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Michelangelo Frammartino, Zacharius Kunuk, Gaston Kaboré, Pat Collins, Ellin Hare and Sirkka-Liisa Kontinnen (Amber Collective).

He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Film Education Journal (published by UCL Press in association with the British Film Institute), and the Scottish International Film Education Conference (both founded in 2018), and in the latter capacity has led events with John Sayles, Michelangelo Frammartino, Nobuhiro Suwa and Mike Figgis.

He is founder of the Map of Stories project (https://mapofstories.scot/), a multimedia website celebrating Scotland’s diverse, living oral storytelling traditions, delivered in collaboration with Traditional Arts and Culture, Rectangle Design, the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and Tobar an Dualchais. Map of Stories was launched in 2022, at the Scottish Parliament, as part of Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories.