Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur

Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist and director of international programmes dedicated to the documentation and digital preservation of endangered languages worldwide.  She is the Director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), the world’s largest digital archive of endangered languages. She is an advisor for UNESCO on the world atlas of languages. She has more than two decades of experience in higher education, research funding, and cultural heritage, leading initiatives that support linguists, community researchers, and cultural institutions to record, safeguard, and share the world’s linguistic diversity.

Her work focuses on building sustainable infrastructures for audiovisual archives, advancing best practices in language documentation, and promoting equitable access to knowledge for speaker communities, scholars, and the wider public. She teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where she works with students and practitioners on the intersections of language, culture, and media. She has also collaborated on major exhibition projects at institutions such as the Barbican, the British Museum, and the Humboldt Forum in Germany, bringing endangered languages and the voices of speaker communities into wider public conversations about culture, memory, and the future. Her research and public engagement highlight the role of language, oral literature, and storytelling in cultural resilience, and she is a frequent speaker on the importance of documenting and archiving humanity’s intangible heritage for future generations.