Alex Rivera

Rivera is a filmmaker and media artist exploring issues around migration to the United States, including exploitative labor practices, surveillance technologies, and immigration policy. He is an associate professor in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at ASU, based in Los Angeles. As noted by the MacArthur Foundation: In feature-length and short films, documentaries, music videos, and multimedia installations, Rivera was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship straddles traditional forms of documentary and narrative drama and crafts incisive critiques of socioeconomic injustices grounded in an activist orientation.” Rivera received a BA from Hampshire College (1995). Rivera’s first feature-length narrative film, Sleep Dealer (2008), a science fiction thriller set in a near future. America’s insatiable appetite for low-wage labor is fulfilled by workers in Mexico who control robots in U.S. factories and farms via technology implanted in their bodies. His latest project is a collaboration with his partner, documentary filmmaker Cristina Ibarra, entitled The Infiltrators (2019). The film is based on events at an ICE detention center in 2012, when two undocumented young activists presented themselves for arrest and incarceration at a Florida facility (MacArthur Foundation, 2022).

Photos by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.