The International Documentary Association (IDA) has announced the 37th Annual IDA Documentary Awards honorary award recipients, which includes Cecilia Aldarondo for the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award, presented to a filmmaker who by virtue of their early work shows extraordinary promise in exploring the possibilities of the nonfiction art form.
The honor with comes with a $5,000 unrestricted grant is presented to Aldarondo, whose most recent film, Landfall, was the winner of the 2020 DOC NYC Film Festival Viewfinders Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, and was nominated for Cinema Eye and Independent Spirit Awards. Both Landfall and Aldarondo’s first feature, Memories of a Penitent Heart, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and aired on POV.
Aldarondo is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Among Aldarondo's fellowships and honors are the Guggenheim, a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2021 New America Fellowship, and Women at Sundance 2017. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC's 40 Under 40 list and is one of 2015’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. She teaches at Williams College.
