AUBREY CALWAY (Full Bio)

Aubrey Calaway is an American curator and researcher based in Portland, Maine. He currently serves as the founding director of the Violet Institute.  

Drawing on a background in the social sciences, documentary, and media production, Calaway is broadly interested in uncertainty, the extreme, and the blurring of what is human and what is not. He works out of his studio in Portland, Maine, and maintains close ties to southeast Texas, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Calaway earned degree in sociology and development studies (honors) from Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa. As a student, he conducted six months of ethnographic fieldwork within Brown’s nascent chapter of Turning Point USA (2018-2019), studying conservative masculinity and outsider status within liberal universities.

He served as a research assistant on two sociological studies of Hurricane Harvey recovery at Rice University, led by Dr. Anna Rhodes and by Dr. James R. Elliott and Dr. Kevin Loughran, respectively. His honors thesis, Riskland, draws on on original, independent fieldwork about how uncertainty is produced and navigated in the times in-between cyclical natural disaster in rural Ecuador (Watson Institute).

He went on to have a brief career in journalism, where he did early reporting about the intersection of AI and human trafficking (Business and Human Rights Centre), as well as the anti-trans interests of digital authoritarianism in the United States (TransLash).  

He attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at Maine College of Art & Design in 2022, where he later lectured on experimental sound art and documentary ethics.

He has helped adapt institutional expertise for stories in sound for MIT, ICA Miami, ClimateOne, One Breath Alliance, and Brightline Defense. He adapted Riskland, his honors thesis research in Ecuador, into a limited series podcast for Earth Refuge in both English and Spanish.

Before founding the Violet, Calaway served as the director of Foghorn, an audio documentary collective space in Portland. He was on staff at TransLash Media as a producer and project manager, where his team was honored with a GLAAD Media Award, multiple Signal Awards, and a Webby nomination.