The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 2018 fellows which includes Latinx filmmakers Alexandra Cuesta, Nicolás Pereda, and William David Caballero. The Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
Ecuadorean-born Alexandra Cuesta 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. Territorio (2016), her first feature length film, premiered in the Official Selection of the FID Marseille Film Festival in France in 2016. It 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, 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).
Her award winning 16mm films Despedida, Piensa En Mi, Recordando El Ayer, and Beirut 2.14.05, have been presented in 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, FICValdivia International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum Tokyo, among others. Early in her career Cuesta was included in 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century by Film Comment Magazine.
Mexican-born Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His films have been exhibited in festivals around the world like Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, San Sebastian and New York Film Festivals and have been awarded over twenty-five international prizes. He has had more than twenty retrospectives in various festivals, cinematheques and archives around the world including Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive and the Jeonju International Film Festival.
William David Caballero is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, writer, composer, violinist, and multimedia storyteller. Born in Coney Island, New York and raised in North Carolina, Caballero obtained the Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship in 2001, and returned to New York City where he graduated from Pratt Institute (BFA Digital Art, 2006, Minor in Art History ) and New York University (MA The Arts and Humanities in Education, 2008). Caballero's directorial debut came in the form of a feature length autobiographical documentary entitled American Dreams Deferred, which focused on the diverse health, financial, and social difficulties facing his Puerto Rican-American family. His cinema-verité film went on to have a national television premiere on PBS.
In 2013, Caballero was selected for the Aljira Emerge program (in partnership with Creative Capital), a strategic career management and exhibition platform for emerging artists. Working in the field of 3D printed short films, his recent achievements include Gran'pa Knows Best, an interstitial series based on his short film, How You Doin', Boy?, which was licensed by HBO LATINO in 2015. In September, 2016, Univision debuted his latest web-series, Dreamer Generation, which features the stories of members of the Dreamers' Movement, shot using 3D scanned/printed miniatures. In 2017, Caballero's latest short film, Victor and Isolina, debuted at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, and The Museum of Modern Art (Documentary Fortnight).
