Ethnocine

Elena Herminia Guzman

is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her ethnographic research focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings.

In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a documentary filmmaker. She co-directed a film entitled Bronx Lives (2014) that explores homelessness for Latinx and African Americans in New York. Her work has shown at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana and she has received grants from Leeway Foundation, Scribe Foundation, Cornell Council for the Arts, Society for the Humanities, and Haverford College. She is also the director of the film Smile4Kime, currently in production, an autoethnographic portrait about friendship that explores the intersections of race, gender, and mental health. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.

@Elena_Herminia