writer/director

Photo of Cristina

Cristina Ibarra

Cristina Ibarra is a multiple Sundance-award winning filmmaker who made her first film, Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela, from scraps of home movies, recycled television and her own fiction because she wanted to see brown girls like her on screen. This short film won the Jury and Audience awards at Imagenation and African American Women in Cinema and was broadcast on PBS in 2002.

Over the past twenty years, Ibarra has developed a genre-bending, media-mixing cinematic impulse inspired by her Spanglish, border-crossing, Tex-Mex roots. In her feature documentary, Las Marthas, she follows South Texas debutantes who portray American revolutionaries on George Washington’s birthday. It won multiple documentary festival awards before it was broadcast on Independent Lens in 2014.

Her most recent docu-thriller, The Infiltrators, recreates a bold infiltration by undocumented activists into an immigrant detention center. It received the NEXT Audience and Innovator Awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It was broadcast on POV in 2019 and is being distributed by Oscilloscope.

Ibarra is a current Chicken & Egg Fellow and a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. She is an Associate Professor of Filmmaking Practice at ASU's Sidney Poitier New American Film School. She studied at UT Austin and lives in Los Angeles.