My research examines contemporary Central American cinema and its tendency to reflect on the conditions of its own making. I study how filmmakers deploy self-reflexive strategies to grapple with questions of representation, complicity, and the precarious position of cinema in the region. This reflexivity is not ornamental, but a mode through which films interrogate how stories of migration, conflict, and identity come to be told at all.

Interdisciplinary in scope, my work draws on film theory, cultural studies, and decolonial approaches while remaining rooted in close readings of films. My background in literature and cultural studies in Guatemala, together with my professional experience as a filmmaker, grounds a research practice that treats cinema as both artistic expression and philosophical experiment, a means of questioning the frames through which culture and history become visible.

Interests

• Central American Cinema and Visual Culture
• Metacinema and Film Theory
• Latin American Cultural Studies
• Indigeneity and Decolonial Approaches
• Migration, Memory, and Post-Conflict Studies

Graduate supervisor: Jon Beasley-Murray

“Mecanismos de censura estatal en el cine centroamericano: Los casos de Nicaragua y Guatemala” Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas, Calgary, May 2025.

“Building an Indigenous Film Archive in Guatemala: A Decolonial Approach to Audiovisual Heritage” InDigital V, Washington DC, February 2025.