Mark Hobart is the founder and current Director of the Centre for Media and Film Studies SOAS, University of London (details). He has been working on Indonesia since 1968, including eight years' field research on different aspects of Balinese society and culture. Among the main themes as been a long term study of Balinese theatre and dance on which he has written extensively. His present interest is how performance is increasingly mediated by radio, television, film, VCD/DVD, and the internet, and how this is changing the nature of performance itself in Indonesia .

After graduating from Cambridge in Social Anthropology, Mark Hobart completed his doctorate on Balinese society at SOAS. His teaching has included film and semiotics, South East Asian cinema, media and cultural studies' theory. He occupies a critical position between anthropology and media and cultural studies, using their respective strengths to open new ways of imagining the subjects and objects of academic study. Mark Hobart has been active in developing media and cultural studies in Indonesia . Since 1990 he has directed a project to build an archive of cultural broadcasts on Balinese television, which is now one of the largest extant archives of television materials. For his contribution to Balinese culture he was recently awarded the Darma Kusuma (the equivalent of the Légion d'honneur ) by the Indonesian government. In his leisure time he is active in promoting Javanese and Balinese theatre and dance internationally. This includes active engagement with Indonesian dancers and musicians over how to meet the artistic challenges confronting Indonesians as they face an increasingly commercialized world.