Esteban Gomez

Professor Gómez is an award-winning filmmaker with a background in archaeology, museum and heritage studies, science and technology studies, and visual anthropology. He served as the producer and lead writer for his first feature-length film, Snapshots of Confinement. The film won a Telly Award for Social Responsibility and an award in the Race and Society category from the LA Press Club. The film has also been nominated for best film in the Culture/History category for the LA Area Emmys. Snapshots is based on an MA Thesis written by Whitney Peterson, a former graduate student in the department of anthropology at DU. Gómez worked with Peterson in the production and writing for the film.

Gómez was a co-host for season 1 of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human, and Senior Advisor for season 6 entitled, “The Problems with Coming of Age,” which received a Silver Honor from the 16th Annual Shortys. On SAPIENS, Gómez was responsible for story development, script writing, developing interview guides, and conducting interviews for the podcast.

He is currently working on three other media projects. Up in Smoke: A Human History with Fire is a collaborative project with Dr. Nicole Herzog on humanity's relationship with fire. Todo y Siempre: Portraits of the Promised Land is another documentary film on the immigrant experience in the city of Denver, and Echoes of El Movimiento is a docu-series on the Chicano movement in Colorado and New Mexico.

Gómez received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to teaching at the University of Denver, professor Gómez taught in the Department of Anthropology at Colorado College. He has done archaeological research in Central America, and more recently he did ethnographic research on the educational and environmental problems affecting youth and established residents in Denver’s gentrified neighborhoods.

Throughout his career, professor Gómez has worked to produce pluralistic histories that are inclusive of groups ands peoples whose pasts have been excluded and/or marginalized from larger national narratives.