Ari Purnama is Assistant Professor of Screen Media in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University and a Research Fellow in the Department of Art History and Image Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI), an interdisciplinary organization of scholars examining film and other moving-image media through cognitive, philosophical, aesthetic, neurophysiological, and evolutionary-psychological perspectives. Since 2025, he has been elected as a member of the Utrecht Young Academy (UYA), an independent platform of early-career scholars at Utrecht University that fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and provides critical perspectives on academia, policy, and society. He previously held academic positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon (USA), Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), University Lecturer at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), and Lecturer at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands).