Cristina Ibarra is a Sundance award-winning filmmaker with a 20-year storytelling practice rooted in her border-crossing homeland along the Texas-Mexico border.
The Infiltrators is a docu-thriller about undocumented activists who go undercover inside a detention center to help set free those inside. Currently being distributed by Oscilloscope, the film won the NEXT Audience and Innovator Awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019, among other notable festival awards.
The New York Times calls her previous award-winning documentary Las Marthas, about wealthy South Texas border debutantes who honor George Washington in Laredo, Texas “a striking alternative portrait of border life.” It premiered on Independent Lens in 2014 and is distributed by Women Make Movies.
The Last Conquistador, a documentary about the racially conflicted construction of a monument to a conquistador in El Paso, Texas was broadcast on POV in 2008. USA Today describes it as “heroic.”
Her award-winning directorial debut, Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela, was broadcast on PBS in 2001. Cristina is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including from Open Society Foundations’ Soros Arts Fellowship, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), CPB/PBS Producers Academy, NALIP, Firelight Media, Sundance Institute’s Women’s Initiative, and Creative Capital.