Learn more about Ana Mendieta’s compelling filmworks with film critic/historian B. Ruby Rich, writer/curator Karen Fiss, expert in Latina/o visual and performing arts Laura Pérez (UC Berkeley), and independent filmmaker Raquel Cecilia.

B. Ruby Rich, who previously taught in the film program in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley, is the editor of Film Quarterly, the oldest continuing film journal in North America, and the author of New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut, and Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. She helped organize the first retrospective of Ana Mendieta’s work at the New Museum in 1987. Connected by their mutual work with Cuban culture and politics in the 1980s, Rich was a personal friend of Mendieta

Karen Fiss is a writer and curator who co-organized the exhibition Necessary Force: Art in the Police State with Kym Pinder (Art Museum of the University of New Mexico, 2015). Other recent projects include the film exhibition Blue Flowers in a Catastrophic Landscape (Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2012), and two books: Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition and the Cultural Seduction of France and World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942, with Robert Kargon et al.

Laura Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities, and the forthcoming Ero-Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial. She organized UC Berkeley’s first Latina/o Performance arts series, served as co-curator for Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas in 2009, and curated Labor+a(r)t+orio: Bay Area Latina@ Arts Now in 2011.

Raquel Cecilia is an independent filmmaker currently in post-production on a feature documentary about the life and art of her aunt, Ana Mendieta. Her most recent film, Ana Mendieta, Nature Inside, is currently screening with the exhibition Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta. Cecilia has published essays in exhibition catalogs including She Got Love and Covered in Time and History:The Films of Ana Mendieta, and she was the editor of the first complete filmography of Ana Mendieta. Her first narrative feature film, Entwined, traveled to over twenty-five film festivals internationally, premiering at New York’s NewFest in 1997 and ending at Miami’s 1^st Gay and Lesbian Festival in 1999. Raquel Cecilia is the administrative assistant and film archivist at the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC and has an MFA from The School of Theater Film and Television at UCLA.