Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, scholar, founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activisms collection at Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Negrón-Muntaner’s work spans multiple disciplines and practices, including cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics. Her work focuses on a comparative exploration of coloniality in the Americas, with special attention to the intersections between race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Among her books and publications are: Puerto Rican Jam (1997), Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (2017). Her films include AIDS in the Barrio: Eso no me pasa a mí (co-directed with Peter Biella), Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, and War for Guam. Negrón-Muntaner has received various recognitions, including the United Nations' Rapid Response Media Mechanism global expert designation in Latin/o American media studies (2008); the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, (2012), the Latin American Studies Association’s Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award (2019), and the Premio Borimix from the Society for Educational Arts in New York (2019). Negrón-Muntaner is currently the director of Columbia’s Greater Caribbean Program at the Institute of Latin American Studies. Her most recent art and film project is Valor y Cambio, an art, digital storytelling, and just economy project in Puerto Rico and New York; she is currently writing a book about Arturo Schomburg and releasing a volume of the translated work of Manuel Ramos Otero titled Fierce: The Essential Manuel Ramos Otero (2020).