Alex Rivera is an award-winning filmmaker with more than 25 years of experience directing and producing documentaries, scripted feature films, and new media, which explores themes of globalization, migration and technology. His credits include the visionary sci-fi film “Sleep Dealer” and the docu-thriller “The Infiltrators”. Rivera has guest lectured at 40 colleges and universities, speaks at conferences and serves on film juries. Rivera’s work is supported by the Ford Foundation, Creative Capital, and the Open Society Institute. Rivera is an associate professor in The Sidney Poitier New American Film School. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.
Cristina Ibarra is a Sundance award-winning filmmaker whose work explores life in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands through a deeply place-based lens. For over twenty-five years, she has crafted hybrid documentary films rooted in the landscapes, institutions, and everyday spaces that shape border communities. Her feature documentary Las Marthas, about a Mexican-American debutante tradition in South Texas, aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens. She later co-directed the docu-thriller The Infiltrators, which premiered at Sundance and broadcast on PBS’s acclaimed series POV. Across her films, Ibarra explores how borders—geographic, political, and cultural—are lived on the ground. Ibarra is the recipient of fellowships from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Firelight Media, and Creative Capital. She is an Associate Professor in The Sidney Poitier New American Film School and a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.
