Hemispheric Institute Fellows

Carmen Oquendo-Villar (2008-2010)

Carmen Oquendo-Villar (Harvard Ph.D) is a film/media scholar and a documentary filmmaker. She is the Jacob Javits Fellow at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where she serves as researcher and film curator and at Tisch's Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, where she continues her filmmaking training. Cinema Tropical has selected Oquendo-Villar as one of the 30 leading New York-based film professionals (programmers, distributors, film critics, scholars, journalists, etc.) working on Latino and Latin American cinema today. She has published academic articles on diverse cultural fields including film, media and politics, performance studies, narrative, 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, which will have a hybrid publication format, including a university press book and a multimedia component with archival material and user-generated content. Her second book project deals with Che Guevara and the photography of history in Latin American documentary. As a scholar of social media, Carmen engages with the creation of virtual communities by LGBT Latin@ groups and the ways they conduct advocacy campaingns online.

Carmen's documentaries (www.oquendovillar.com) grapple with issues of gender and sexuality, including a series of portraits of members of the Boston Latin@ trans community. She is currently working on The Needle (finalist HBO Documentaries competition), a verité documentary about beauty industries/technologies in Puerto Rico, specifically about ideals and practices amongst the transgender community. Sponsored by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, her next documentary (Diana de Santa Fe) will be filmed in the "tolerance zone" of Santa Fe in Colombia, in collaboration with the Association of Transgender Prostitutes in Bogotá. Oquendo-Villar has been invited to participate in discussions that seek to transcend the traditional divisions between production and critical studies, expanding notions of media creation that provide critical perspectives on the cultural, economic, and practical implications of "old" and "new" media forms. Her research, films, and media projects have been funded by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the National Endowment for the Arts, WGBH, NALIP's Latino Producers Academy, and Harvard's Film Study Center. She currently serves as film/video curator in HEMI, after having served for 7 years as part of the Boston Latino International Film Festival’s curatorial team, where she created the Latin@ LGBT Film Series.

 

Rafael Abolafia (2008)

Granted with a fellowship (Consejería de Cultura / Junta de Andalucía / Spain) to further and improve his studies on scenic and performing arts, Rafael Abolafia is spending this academic year as a visiting scholar at the Department of Performance Studies / Tisch School of the Arts / NYU. He earned an M.A. in English Studies (1996-2000), and has completed the first two academic years of his PhD (2000-2002) at the Faculty of Arts and Educational Sciences / Universidad de Jaén (Spain). He was granted a Sócrates-Erasmus fellowship to study at Northumbria University (Newcastle / UK / 1997-1998). Since 2005, Rafael has worked as a Direction Assistant at Centro Andaluz de Teatro (Junta de Andalucía / Spain), providing directorial assistance in the theatre, coordinating research groups (Transborder Theatre; Gender and Theatre; Andalusian Scenic Heritage; Spectators’ Educational Project) and organizing international encounters (Mediterranean Theatre; Latin American Dramaturgy; European Women on the Stage). Rafael has taken seminars on Theatre and Anthropology (Universidad de Granada / Spain / 2004) and Theatre and Cultural Dialogue (Festival d’Avignon / France / 2008). He received a degree in Acting at Centro de Estudios Escénicos de Andalucía (Spain / 2001-2003) and has performed professionally. Intercultural Performance is one of his major interests for future research.

Silvia Citro (2008)

Silvia Citro is a researcher with CONICET (Argentina), and Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires. She also leads a group of graduate/postgraduate students and performers who research dances and body techniques from different performative traditions, using kinesthetic-participatory ethnography (www.antropologiadelcuerpo.com). She has written two books about aboriginal rituals and dances of the Argentine Chaco: Cuerpos Significantes. Travesías de una etnografía dialéctica (Biblos, 2009), and La Fiesta del 30 de Agosto entre los Mocovi de Santa Fe (Univ. Buenos Aires, 2007), in collaboration with indigenous authors. She received the Latin-American Musicology Award Samuel Claro Valdez for her study about Mocovi dances. Currently, she is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, working on dialectical approaches to dances and embodiment.