Alexandra Cuesta

Cuenca, Ecuador

Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works between the United States and Ecuador. Her films combine documentary practices, experimental traditions and visual anthropology. An observer with a pressing curiosity of the world around her, she is interested in documenting the everyday, the ordinary, and believes that cinema is the vehicle to highlight and transcend the poetics of the common experience. Often behind the camera, she finds a connection to the world and to the subjects of her films. She is drawn to stories that exist in the in-between spaces, both in the public and the private spheres - an African poet passing through a Mexican-American neighborhood, the invisibility of bus riders against the massive car culture in Los Angeles, the construction of time in isolated populations spread through the Ecuadorian territory, a self-portrait that narrates the end of a love story, the inner lives of two women of different generations existing in a small town in the Ecuadorian highlands.

Her award-winning films Notes, Imprints (On Love), Despedida, Piensa En Mi, Recordando El Ayer, and Beirut 2.14.05, have been presented at the New York Film Festival, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cinema Du Reel, Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, Habana Film Festival, BFI Film Festival, Oberhausen, Courtisane Film Festival, FICValdivia International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum Tokyo, among others.

Territorio (2016), her first feature length film has screened in a number of festivals, museums, and cultural institutions, including the Viennale International Film Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles MOCA, BAFICI, First Look Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image, BAFICI, Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Cuenca, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the III Fronteira Festival Internacional Do Filme Documental E Experimental in Goiania- Brazil, where it received a Special Jury Award (2017), among many others. Territorio was selected among the 25 best Latin American films of 2017 by Cinema Tropical.

In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Film and Video and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and residency.

She received her MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts and her BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design.