Biography

Cristina Ibarra is a Sundance award-winning filmmaker with a 20-year practice rooted in her border crossing roots along the Texas-Mexico border. The Infiltrators is a docu-thriller about undocumented activists on a secret mission inside a detention center is currently being distributed by Oscilloscope. It won the Audience and the Innovator Award in the NEXT section 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 PBS’s 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. She is the recipient of fellowships from Soros, Rauschenberg, Rockefeller, NYFA, CPB/PBS, NALIP, Firelight, the Sundance Women’s Initiative and Creative Capital, among others.