Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar. She holds a Masters in Visual Anthropology and Fine Arts from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. For her work as a scholar and filmmaker, Negrón-Muntaner has received Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships as well as a Social Science Research Council grant. Major foundations and public television stations have also supported her work.

Among Negrón-Muntaner's books are Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (2004 Choice Outstanding Book), Puerto Rican Jam (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era (Palgrave, 2006) and Sovereign Acts (South End Press, forthcoming, 2008).

Negrón-Muntaner's films have been screened throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Latin America, as well as broadcast on many public television stations. Her films include: AIDS in the Barrio (Gold Award at the John Muir Medical Festival in 1990), and Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1995 Whitney Biennial, Audience Award at the 1995 San Juan CinemaFest, and Merit Selection at the 1995 Latin American Studies Association Film Festival). She is currently completing two documentaries for television on the relationship between U.S. territories and the military titled The War in Guam and Regarding Vieques.

Negrón-Muntaner is also the founder of Miami Light Project's Filmmakers Workshop (a program that seeks to promote independent filmmaking in South Florida), and a founding board member and former chair of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), the nation's largest organization of Latino mediamakers. In 2005, she was named as 1 of “100 Most Influential Hispanics” by Hispanic Business magazine. In 2008, the United Nations' Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as a “global expert” in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American culture and politics. She teaches Latino and Caribbean literatures and cultures at Columbia University.

For more information on Negrón-Muntaner's work, please see her website, www.francesnegronmuntaner.net. (09/09)

Brincando El Charco
A film by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, 1994, 55 min., Color/BW
Refreshingly sophisticated in both form and content, BRINCANDO EL CHARCO contemplates the notion of “identity” through the experiences of a Puerto Ric...