Buffett Q&A Documentary: Using Virtual Reality for Cultural Heritage Preservation and Interpretation with Craig Stevens, Buffett Dissertation Fellow

In this 15-minute short documentary produced by the Roberta Buffett Institute, Buffett Dissertation Fellow Craig Stevens shares his research leveraging technologies like virtual reality and photogrammetry to allow African communities to meaningfully contribute to the interpretation and curation of their globally dispersed artifacts and cultural objects.

Craig Stevens describes himself as an “atypical” anthropologist. A 2025–26 Buffett Dissertation Fellow who spent the past year completing his PhD in Northwestern University's Department of Anthropology, Stevens draws on cutting edge techniques including photogrammetry, 3D digitization, and virtual reality technology to create immersive digital experiences that allow African communities to engage with their own dispersed cultural objects, many of which have sat behind glass in American museums for generations. This new short documentary produced by the Roberta Buffett Institute follows him into the field as he pursues some of the most innovative work in digital heritage preservation today. 

A Revelation in the Exhibition Hall 

The project grew out of Augmented Curiosities: Virtual Play in African Pasts and Futures, an exhibition Stevens curated for Northwestern’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. There, visitors could don a VR headset and pick up African objects off a virtual shelf with their own hands, an experience that proved incredibly powerful and profound for both museumgoers and Stevens himself. When he brought the exhibition to The Gambia, Cameroon, Liberia, and Ghana, he saw African audiences engage with profound excitement and gratitude. “That made me realize I could use this to actually bring objects back to Africa,” he says, “and people would be excited about it.” 

Into the Villages 

Stevens began cold-emailing curators at major US institutions, from the Brooklyn Museum and the Field Museum to the Penn Museum and others, requesting permission to digitize Liberian objects in their collections. He then loaded those 3D models onto a Meta Quest 3 headset and traveled to Monrovia, Liberia, where he worked with the National Museum of Liberia and other local partners to travel to the villages from which those objects originated and record community members’ interactions with and interpretations of them. Despite associations between virtual reality and youth digital literacy, the youngest participant in the project was actually 41; the eldest, 103. Far from being a barrier, VR proved one of the most accessible digital interfaces Stevens had encountered — hand-based, language-agnostic, and requiring no prior technical knowledge. 

What those sessions captured was exactly what museum records cannot: the affective, spiritual, and ceremonial context that, as Stevens puts it, “escapes what archaeologists and curators typically know.” His dissertation’s core argument follows directly from this conclusion: that immersive technologies can meaningfully enable communities to participate in the interpretation and curation of their own heritage, and that museums have a responsibility to bridge these gaps. “If there are any museums listening,” he says in the film, “I’d love to work with you.”

Restoration Over Extraction 

Stevens is deliberate about the ethical stakes of this work. Anthropology has long been criticized as "the handmaiden of colonialism," extracting knowledge from vulnerable communities to serve academic and imperial interests. This is a legacy he has consciously built his practice in opposition to, and the trust he has earned shows clearly in his work and the communities he collaborated with. "I'm also giving something back to the community," he says. "They feel like people care about what they think. They're not forgotten." 

Stevens is equally clear that VR engagement with material culture is no substitute for repatriation. Objects and artifacts displaced through colonial extraction belong with the communities they came from, and he sees his work not as an alternative to that process but as a catalyst for it — fostering engagement with these objects, he hopes, will only intensify the demand to have them returned, rather than replace it.   

A former Marshall Scholar and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Stevens recently completed his doctorate and will join the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies, where the platforms and partnerships he has built at Northwestern will continue to grow.