Cinematic Borderlands Film and Conversation Series

Cristina Ibarra is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and award-winning filmmaker whose storytelling is rooted in her Tex-Mex, Spanglish, border-crossing identity. Over her 25-year career, Ibarra has crafted a cinematic approach that merges genres to illuminate border-crossing narratives and their complexities.

Her most recent film, The Infiltrators, is a groundbreaking docu-thriller about undocumented activists who infiltrate an immigrant detention center to stop deportations. The hybrid feature won the NEXT Audience and Innovator Awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on POV in 2020, and is distributed by Oscilloscope.

Her feature documentary Las Marthas follows South Texas debutantes reenacting revolutionary history, blending observation and spectacle to explore the border’s layered identity. It premiered on Independent Lens in 2014 after receiving multiple festival awards. Earlier, The Last Conquistador examined the moral dilemmas of public art and history, airing on POV in 2008.

Ibarra’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Rauschenberg Residency, Creative Capital, Firelight Media, the Soros Foundation, and others. Her debut, Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela, premiered on PBS in 2002. She is a co-founder of the Borderlands Cinematic Arts program at ASU.

Dr. Maribel Alvarez is an anthropologist and folklorist at The University of Arizona, where she holds the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore. She founded the Southwest Folklife Alliance, directs the Tucson Meet Yourself Festival, and has worked extensively in Mexico on food sovereignty and cultural preservation. A longtime educator with NALAC, she has trained hundreds of Latinx cultural leaders. Her research focuses on festivals, border culture, and stereotypes, including the “Sleeping Mexican” image. In 2018, she received the Americo Paredes Prize for blending scholarship with community engagement.

Jacob Bricca, ACE is an award-winning documentary editor, scholar, and consultant whose credits include the international theatrical hit Lost In La Mancha (2002), the Sundance Special Jury Award Winner The Bad Kids (2016) and the Peabody Award Winner Missing in Brooks County (2021). His book Documentary Editing: Principles and Practice is the definitive textbook on documentary editing, used by film schools around the world. He is the founder and chair of the American Cinema Editors Education Committee and holds a post as Professor at the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film and Television.

Alex Rivera is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology.

Rivera’s first feature film, Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk thriller set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and had a commercial theatrical release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries. In The New York Times A.O. Scott described Rivera as “a brilliant young director” and Variety named him one of “Ten Directors to Watch.”

Rivera’s second feature, The Infiltrators, won the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The Infiltrators uses documentary and scripted forms to tell the true story of Dreamers who ‘infiltrate’ a detention center to get immigrants out. The Hollywood Reporter raved “watching it is a thrill” and The New Yorker Radio Hour called the film “extraordinary and important.”

Rivera is currently developing a science-fiction update of the classic Mexican avenger titled Zorro 2.0, and, with support from the Ford Foundation, a feature documentary on the history of deportation titled Banishment.

Alex Rivera is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Hampshire College and lives in Los Angeles. He is an Associate Professor of Filmmaking Practice at ASU’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School and co-founder of the Borderlands Cinematic Arts program at ASU.

Melissa del Bosque is cofounder of The Border Chronicle news outlet. Del Bosque has been the recipient of an Emmy, RFK Human Rights award and several other journalism awards for her work on the U.S.-Mexico border. She has written for outlets including ProPublica, The New Yorker, The Texas Observer and The Guardian. She is also the author of Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty.

David Taylor, professor of art at the University of Arizona, explores place, history, politics, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, he published Working the Line (2010) and Monuments: 276 Views of the U.S.–Mexico Border (2015). His work is held by the Nevada Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins, MFA Houston, and the Library of Congress. Exhibited internationally, he has shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, and Utah Museum of Fine Arts, with a solo exhibition at Museo de Arte de Sonora planned for 2026.