American Identities

Curated by Carmen Oquendo-Villar

Biography

Carmen Oquendo-Villar (Harvard Ph.D) is the Jacob Javits Fellow at New York University’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television in Tisch School of the Arts, where she is continuing her filmmaking training, and at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where she serves as film curator. She has published academic articles on diverse cultural fields including film, narrative, performance studies, media and politics, and gender and sexuality in several scholarly publications including E-misférica: Performance and Politics in the Americas, Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America, and Memory Market in Latin America, a forthcoming book from Duke University Press. She is completing a book on Chile’s 1973 Coup as a performance and media event, with Augusto Pinochet as its leading political icon. As a visual artist and filmmaker (www.oquendovillar.com), she has focused her work around issues of gender and sexuality, having completed a series of film portraits of members of the Boston and Puerto Rico Latin@ trans community. She is currently working on a documentary with José Correa about beauty ideals and practices amongst the Puerto Rican transgender community. “Trans,” her latest curatorial work for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, has been exhibited in Space Other Gallery in Boston and in the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. She is currently curating a film and video program for the 2009 Encuentro in Bogotá about citizenship and cultural rights, after having served for 6 years as part of the Boston Latino International Film Festival’s curatorial team.