Award-winning director Alex Rivera is coming to The University of New Mexico campus to talk about his film, Sleep Dealer, and other current projects during two public events.
The first event is on April 28 inside Dane Smith Hall, Room 228 at 12:30 p.m. Rivera will discuss his 2008 feature film, Sleep Dealer, which won multiple awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
On April 29, Rivera will talk to audiences about his current projects at the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute (SHRI) conference room at 1 p.m. SHRI is located at 1829 Sigma Chi Road NE. The event is part of SHRI’s public education efforts to link innovative research on communities in the Southwest with UNM students and community members.
Rivera is a filmmaker who, for the past 15 years, has been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories.
His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, a science-fiction feature set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened as part of ‘New Directors / New Films’ at the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, and had a commercial release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries around the world.
Rivera is a Sundance Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, USA Artist Fellow, Creative Capital grantee, was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and was named one of Variety Magazine’s “10 Directors to Watch.”
In 2015, Rivera was awarded major support from the Surdna Foundation for his film-in-progress, ‘The Infiltrators,’ and he received an Art & Technology Lab Grant from LACMA for an upcoming project in virtual reality with VR pioneer Nonny de la Peña. Other recent collaborations have included work with Manu Chao, La Santa Cecilia and Aloe Blacc. Rivera studied at Hampshire College.
For more information, contact Froilan Orozco, forozco@unm.edu, or Dr. Barbara Reyes, (breyes3@unm.edu).