Ari Purnama is a tenured Assistant Professor of Screen Media in the Department of Media and Culture Studies and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University. 

He is an elected Fellow of the Society for 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. Ari is an editorial board member of the Media Practice and Education Journal, a leading interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the role of creative media practice in the university sector and its important place in our society through bridging the traditional written article and alternative forms of creative-critical dissemination of research. He is also a Research Fellow in the Department of Art History and Image Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa. 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).