Filmmaker Jasmin Mara López has been named one of the 35 winners of the 2020 Creative Capital Award for her debut feature Silent Beauty, a personal documentary about Jasmin López’s family’s history with child sexual abuse and a culture of silence. The work extends as an audio-visual installation that features the voices of dozens of survivors—adults and older children with parents—that have reached out to the artist to share their stories.
López is a journalist, audio producer, and filmmaker based in New Orleans. Born in the U.S. with familial roots in Mexico, her childhood was affected by issues experienced on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. This instilled in her a strong passion for immigrant rights, youth empowerment, and social change. In 2007, López founded Project Luz, a project that teaches youth in Mexico to document stories within their communities. In 2015, she was awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’s Excellence in Journalism Award for her documentary Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border.
She teaches radio to youth in Nezahualcóyotl and Coxcatlán, Mexico. In addition to receiving support from Creative Capital, Silent Beauty was awarded the 2019 Artist Residency and Fellowship at Ragdale, where López developed the installation and shared her process with local schools in the Chicago area. Silent Beauty was also accepted into the Chicken & Egg Pictures Accelerator Lab.
The Creative Capital Award includes $50,000 in project funding, supplemented by an additional $50,000 in career development services, for a total value of $100,000.
