Discussion Guide Writers

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, MFA | ÁguilasDirector, Writer, Producer
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an associate professor at UCLA, where she heads the documentary track. She's been making documentary films focusing on gender, the Latinx community, and representation for over two decades. Her first feature-length film, Going on 13 (2009, Tribeca, PBS), covers four years in the lives of four adolescent girls. Guevara-Flanagan also produced/directed several short films, including El Corrido de Cecilia Rios (1999, Sundance & Sundance Channel), which chronicles the violent death of a 15-year-old girl. Her feature Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013, SXSW, PBS Independent Lens) traces the evolution and legacy of the comic book hero Wonder Woman and features Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, and real-life superheroines Gloria Steinem and Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre.) The film garnered numerous awards and is one of the highest grossing films in educational distributor New Day’s catalogue. Guevara-Flanagan’s work has been funded by ITVS, Sundance, Tribeca Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities. She has served on juries for several organizations, including Sundance’s Documentary Grant, ITVS, California Humanities, and the Peabody Awards.

Maite Zubiaurre, PhD | ÁguilasCo-Director, Writer, Producer
Maite Zubiaurre has a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University, New York. She is a professor of European languages and transcultural studies, Spanish and Portuguese, digital humanities, and urban humanities at UCLA. Before joining UCLA, Zubiaurre taught at USC, UNAM (Mexico), ITAM (México), and the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of numerous publications, the most recent an award-winning monograph on the cultural representations of contemporary refuse (Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste, Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). She is presently leading a collaborative interdisciplinary project on migrant death and border activism and art titled Forensic Empathy that includes artistic interventions, a scholarly monograph, a digital map, and a feature documentary in the making. Filomena Cruz is Maite Zubiaurre’s alter ego as a visual artist and activist.

Discussion Guide Producer

Courtney B Cook, PhD | Education Manager, POV

This resource was created, in part, with the generous support of the Open Society Foundation.