Alexandra Cuesta

Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and visual artist who combines experimental film traditions with documentary practices. Her 16mm films and videos are portraits of public places, urban landscapes, and the people in them. Reminiscent of documentary practices such as street photography, Cuesta's work is also rooted in the poetic sensibility of the avant-garde. Early films such as Recordando el Ayer, Piensa en Mí, and Despedida, shot in the United States where Cuesta received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, depict migrant neighborhoods and diasporic communities (mainly Hispanic) - and they do so with a poignant sense of longing and belonging. Recent works such as the autobiographical series Notes, Imprints (On Love) (2020-ongoing), and the Structural/Materialist Lungta (commissioned by FICUNAM in 2022) foreground the act of filmmaking itself.

Her work has been widely screened at venues and festivals such as Cinema Du Reel, Viennale International Film Festival, FID Marseille, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Oberhausen, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Art Gallery of Ontario, Punto de Vista, among others. She received an MFA in Film and Video from Cal Arts-California Institute of the Arts and a BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video.