Events

Participants

Participants

Carla Cavina is an interdisciplinary artist, producer, and queer Bori-Italian filmmaker born in the Puerto Rican archipelago. She earned a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Puerto Rico in 2000. After making several short films, she released her first feature film, Extra Terrestres, in 2016. The film was screened at more than 40 film festivals around the world, including theatrical releases in Puerto Rico and Venezuela. It received the “Audience Award” in Puerto Rico, Miami, Milan, and Paris. Cavina is co-founder of the Association of Documentary Filmmakers of Puerto Rico (2012, ADOCPR) and El Taller Cinemático (2002), serving as its Executive Director until 2022. In this non-profit organization, she organized film workshops, international events, and educational films for different communities, young people, and international filmmakers, contributing to the development of the film industry in Puerto Rico. Together with El Taller Cinemático, she recently produced and directed the documentary Golpe de agua, which won Best Documentary at the Puerto Rico Film Festival and received an Honorable Mention at MUMA FEST in Patagonia. She is currently working on various literary, artistic, and film projects.

Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a BA in Escritura Creativa at UPR-Río Piedras and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. Current research interests center on disaster poetics, queerness, race, gender, and migration in Caribbean expressive cultures, while their dissertation analyzes Boricua art and literature in the wake of hurricane María. They also teach Spanish language and courses on Caribbean cultures at NYU. Their literary fiction work has received awards from the University of Puerto Rico (2013, 2016) and the University of Houston (2019), and has been published or anthologized in Puerto Rico, United States, Spain, and Germany. Book publications include a short story collection, Mala leche (Alayubia, 2018), translated into English by Heather Houde as Bad Seed (Feminist Press, 2024), and a novel, Folly (Alayubia, 2024). In 2025, they received a Letras Boricuas Fellowship for Fiction.

Ana Dopico is Director of the Hemispheric Institute at New York University. She works on the comparative cultures of the Caribbean and the Americas and teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. From 2014-2019, she was Director of the KJCC at NYU. She has published work on the novel, the politics of photography in Cuba, visual art and Latin American literature, Latinx American identities in cinema, Cuban cultural history, and political emotion.