Elena Guzman

Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her ethnographic research focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings.

In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a documentary filmmaker. Her work has shown at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana and she has received grants from Black Public Media, Leeway Foundation, Independent Public Media Foundation, Scribe Foundation, Cornell Council for the Arts, Society for the Humanities, and Haverford College. She is also the director of the film Smile4Kime, currently in production, an autoethnographic portrait about friendship that explores the intersections of race, gender, and mental health. She is also co-producing and serving as cinematographer in a docuseries called Conjure. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.