Alexandra Hidalgo
Acting
Biography
Alexandra Hidalgo is an award-winning Venezuelan writer, filmmaker, theorist, memoirist, and editor whose documentaries have been official selections for film festivals in 15 countries and been screened at universities around the United States. She is the recipient of From the Heart Productions' inaugural "Carole Joyce Award for Excellence in Documentary Storytelling." Her videos and writing have been featured in The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, NPR, The Criterion Collection, and Women and Hollywood. She has a PhD in English from Purdue University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and is associate professor and Crow Chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her video book Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition received the 2018 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her scholarship has been published in Kairos, Composition Studies, Enculturation, and Peitho, among others. Her video essay, "Motherhood on the Screen," received the 2020 Kairos Best Webtext Award. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space.
Known For
The filmmaker and her husband filmed their sons reaching the same milestones during the boys’ first year of life, placing the images side by side on the screen so audiences can see how the boys’ individual journeys mirror each other. Besides providing a meditation on how siblings grow up, the film is a joyful look at what it’s like to make sense of the world for the first time.
William and Santiago Simultaneous
In Teta, Alexandra Hidalgo tells the story of her journey nursing her youngest son, Santiago, for twenty-two months. Teta uses Hidalgo’s narration and the footage shot by her husband to portray the ups and downs of nursing a baby as a working mother of two. As the film shows Santiago go from his first nursing session minutes after being born to his last as a walking and talking toddler, Teta illustrates the transcendent emotional bond created by nursing, not only between mother and child but between all members of the family.
Teta
'A Place at the Table' blends the disembodied voices of attendees describing their experience at the March on Lansing with footage of the event to create an immersive, meditative experience of the march for audiences.
A Place at the Table
It tells the story of four immigrant women—Teboho Moja, Melainie Rogers, Daphnie Sicre, and Yatna Vakahria—living in New York City, who are transforming their communities through their work, activism, and the way their cultural hybridity influences their interactions with others. While media portrayals of immigration primarily present it as an abstract threat, this documentary finds the face and heart behind the thousands of people who come into the United States every year determined to make the life they’ve always dreamed of a reality.
Vanishing Borders
In order to meet stringent beauty standards, Venezuelan women often turn to plastic surgery. This documentary features conversations with 14 Venezuelan women and men on the subject.