Cristina Ibarra

Ibarra received her 2021 MacArthur Fellowship for her multi-layered storytelling. She is an associate professor in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at ASU, based in Los Angeles. She is a documentary filmmaker crafting nuanced and compelling narratives about Latino families living in borderland communities. Ibarra grew up on the Texas-Mexico border in El Paso and creates from personal experience of place and family. In multi-layered storytelling, she unearths and portrays complicated colonial legacies and cross-border tensions that continue to exist in the community. Her films depict intergenerational life, displacement, labor struggles and community violence, often from the perspective of Chicana and Latina youth. Ibarra received a BA from the University of Texas at Austin (1997). In her 2014 film "Las Marthas," Ibarra crafts intimate portraits of two young Mexican American women and their families as they prepare for the annual George and Martha Washington debutante ball in Laredo, Texas. Ibarra turns to the immigration policies that haunt borderland communities in "The Infiltrators" (2019), a collaboration with her partner, filmmaker and media artist Alex Rivera. 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. The border, Ibarra notes, “…is a ‘third space’ where you learn to live with contradictions. It is both English and Spanish, Indigenous and colonized, surreal and ordinary. Despite attempts to control them, the borderlands are porous and in a constant state of movement. In my films, I consider the border as more than geography; it is a perspective. I offer this way of seeing to any of us searching for a way to rebuild, reimagine, and update the narratives of our day.”  (MacArthur Foundation, 2022).

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