Strange Truth 2025

Alejandro Ángel Torres

Alejandro Ángel Torres is a director, producer, and new media curator with 20 years of professional experience in film and television in Spain and Colombia. He is the founder of Armadillo: New Media & Films, Director of #NarrarElFuturo: Film & New Media Festival, Associate Professor and Director of CinemaLab at University of Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano (UTADEO). His most recent projects include the documentaries Fighters, Granada: Story of Forgiveness, All The Flowers, Hands of Light, Chakero, and Babel Inhabitants. His groundbreaking transmedia documentary Slow Death: The Uitotos cornered by mercury won Colombia's most prestigious journalism award, the Simon Bolivar National Journalist Prize in 2018, and his projects have been in renowned festivals such as FICCI, Biarritz, Sheffield, Alucine, and BSSF, among others.

Charlotte Schneider Callejas

Charlotte Schneider Callejas Charlotte Schneider Callejas is an activist working for the rights of women, LGBTIQ people, and marginalized ethnic groups. She is a human rights defender, with social and political organizations in Colombia and Latin America. And she is a transfeminist. Born in Cuba, but naturalized as Colombian, Charlotte graduated in biochemistry from the University of Havana. Currently, Charlotte is in charge of the Directorate for Women in Paid Sexual Activities, part of the Colombian Ministry of Equality. In the public sector, she led LGBTIQ, women’s, and gender equality policies, a plan to combat human trafficking, and affirmative action and social services in the social integration secretariat and health secretary of the Bogotá mayor's office. She was director of Bogotá's regional branch of the Department of Social Prosperity, and was part of the gender and diversity advisory team of the Ministry of the Interior office. She is also Project and Research Coordinator of the Colombian League to Fight AIDS, leading HIV prevention projects, comprehensive care for people living with HIV, and research on HIV seroprevalence.

Paula Cuellar Cuellar

Paula Cuellar Cuellar Paula Cuellar Cuellar is currently an Assistant Professor in History and will be named as “Fellow, Jacqueline and Michael Wald Professorship in Human Rights, Genocide, and Holocaust Studies” in the History Department at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her doctorate from the University of Minnesota is in history major and human rights minor. Specifically, she focuses on modern and contemporary history of Latin America, as well as in violence perpetrated in the region during the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition, she holds a Law degree from the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas,” an LL.M. in International Human Rights from the University of Notre Dame, and an Ms.C. in Human Rights and Peace Studies from the University of El Salvador.

Her dissertation is on sexual violations committed by both the security forces and the guerrilla forces against women during the Salvadoran armed conflict. In addition, she studies post conflict societies in Latin America and its transitions to democracy, focusing primarily on the right to truth and truth commissions from a gender perspective. Also, she investigates disappearances in Mexico and Central America. Finally, she analyses genocide in Central America, especially scorched earth operations as genocidal practices, and its impacts on women. Her research is characterized by three overarching themes. First, she is interested in how human rights violations perpetrated in the continent during the Cold War impacted people’s lives, as well as why, in its aftermath, large sectors of society insist on forgiving and forgetting, bypassing the victims’ demands. Second, she approaches history by engaging the voices of those in the social margins like women, peasants, migrants, as well as victims of egregious human rights violations through oral history methods. Third, she revises master narratives that have been predominant in westernized and patriarchal cultures and tries to rewrite history from those marginalized by the mainstream discourses.

Julio López Fernández

Julio López FernándezJulio López Fernández is a director and cinematographic producer of Mexican-Salvadoran nationality. As director, his first feature film was the documentary La batalla del volcán / The battle of the Volcano (2018), followed by Polvo de Gallo / Cocks Quickie (2021) and Añil / Indigo (2023). Among his filmography as a producer are El cuarto de los huesos / The Room of Bones (2015), Los ofendidos / The Offended (2016) and Comandos (2017), directed by Marcela Zamora; El Remolino / The Swirl (2016), directed by Laura Herrero; Herederadel viento / Heiress of the Wind (2017), directed by Gloria Carrión, Se va la vida, compañera (2018), directed by Mariana Rivera and the short film Ausencias / Absences (2015), directed by Tatiana Huezo. All these films have been premiered or awarded at numerous international festivals.

He is founding partner of the Mexican production company Cine Murciélago and the Salvadoran production company Cuma. He has participated on meetings of filmmakers as Berlinale Talent Campus, Emerging Producers of Jihlava IFF, IDFAcademy, and Festival ícaro.

Heather Kelley

Heather Kelley is an award-winning game designer, media artist, curator and researcher. Her experimental game work focuses on unique sensory effects, integrating perceptions of touch, smell, movement, sound, and nervous system response. Since 2015 she has taught at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University, where she holds the title Associate Teaching Professor. She is a founder of the experimental game collective Kokoromi, with whom she produced and curated the renowned GAMMA events from 2006 to 2010, promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. In 2016 Kokoromi released the retrofuturistic VR puzzle game SUPERHYPERCUBE. Ms. Kelley was named by Fast Company magazine as one of 2011’s thirty most influential women in technology. In 2012, she co-curated Joue le jeu, a groundbreaking 5000 m2 exhibition of video games and commissioned play installations in Paris, France. Ms. Kelley’s extensive career in game development has included design and production of touchscreen vibrator controllers, AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, mobile and handheld games, research games, installation games, and web communities for girls. She holds a Master of Arts in Communication from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Sandy Stone’s student.

Carmen Oquendo-Villar

A current Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow, and a past Guggenheim Fellow, Carmen Oquendo-Villar is a Puerto Rican visual artist whose work has been exhibited worldwide. She studied film, photography, and performance art at NYU and in the Film Study Center at Harvard University, where she also obtained a Ph.D. in literature. As a differently-abled artist, her work focuses on disability issues and trans groups in Latin America and within Latinx communities in the US. Currently, she's working on Santafé, a transmedia documentary that explores Bogotá's red-light district in Santafé.

Bishakh ‘Rani’ Som

Rani Som is a trans woman who published two graphic novels in 2020: Apsara Engine (The Feminist Press) and Spellbound (Street Noise Books). Apsara Engine was the 2020 Winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel, 2021 Winner Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Comics, and 2021 Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Award for LGBTQ Fiction. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, We’re Still Here (first all-trans comics anthology), Beyond, The Strumpet, The Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, VICE, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Ink Brick, Hi-horse (a four-person comics anthology of which she was a co-editor and contributing artist), Blurred Vision, Pood, Specs, The Brooklyn Rail, and the acclaimed Graphic Canon series from Seven Stories Press. She received the prestigious Xeric Grant in 2003. Her architectural work is featured in Singlehandedly: Contemporary Architects Draw by Hand (Princeton Architectural Press) and she illustrated The Prefab Bathroom: An Architectural History (McFarland Press). Although she received a Master’s Degree in Architecture from Harvard University and worked for many years in the field (most notably at I.M. Pei’s New York office), she switched her focus to concentrate on trans-themed art, comics, illustration, and graphic design.

Allucquére Rosanne ‘Sandy’ Stone

Sandy Stone is Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the Convergent Media program of the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Sandy was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2024. Her archive has been procured by Harvard Radcliffe Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, alongside Angela Davis, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Amelia Earhart. Stone received a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz; has been Senior Artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts; Fellow of the Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine; and visiting lecturer in the departments of Communication and Sociology at the University of California San Diego, where she taught film, linguistics, gender, cultural studies, and feminist theory. She has conducted research on the neurological basis of vision and hearing for the National Institutes of Health; was a member of the Bell Telephone Laboratories Special Systems Exploratory Development Group; has been a consultant, computer programmer, technical writer, and engineering manager in Silicon Valley; and worked with Jimi Hendrix in music recording. She was invited to Sundance Institute. She produced the Monterey Symphony radio broadcast series and is currently the sound engineer for the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival. She was director of the Group for the Study of Virtual Systems at the Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz; was program chair and organizer for the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, member of the program committee for the Third International Conference on Cyberspace in 1993, and director of all subsequent Conferences on Cyberspace.

Her academic publications include “Will The Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures,” in Michael Benedikt, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press); “Sex, Death, and Architecture,” in Architecture-New York; “Virtual Systems,” in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds. ZONE 6: Incorporations (MIT Press); “The Architecture of Elsewhere,” in Hraszthan Zeitlian, ed. Semiotext(e) Architecture; and “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein, eds. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Sexual Ambiguity (Routledge). Her book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age was published by MIT Press, and is currently available in English, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Chinese. Her work appeared in such publications as Lusitania, ANY (Architecture New York), and Assemblage. Her experiments with theory as performance are well known, and she toured a one-person “theoryperformance” on technology, body, and desire, parts of which she continues to perform to this day. She’s been in numerous films, including The Lady and the Dale (Dir. Zackary Drucker, HBO 6-part series), and two films by German director Monika Treut, Gendernauts and Genderation. She is the sound engineer and Board Chair for KSQD radio station in Santa Cruz. In 2022-23, in preparation for the GIRL ISLAND film, book, and audiobook, she was Visiting Scholar/Artist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of New Mexico, St. John’s College, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, New York University, and Johns Hopkins University.

Marjorie ‘Marji’ Vecchio

Marji Vecchio is a 2023-24 Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellow at Johns Hopkins University for her first film GIRL ISLAND. She has 25+ years of experience as a photographer, curator, book editor, teacher, and gallery director. While President of Artemisia Gallery (Chicago) and Director of Sheppard Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, she curated over 250 artists in 40+ exhibitions, published 20+ catalogs, organized artist and filmmaker residencies, and commissioned writers and graphic designers. Her book The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (International Library of the Moving Image, I.B. Tauris, London: 2014) includes a foreword by Wim Wenders, five interviews, and fifteen contributors, including Claire Denis, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, actor Alec Descas, musicians The Tindersticks, and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The book was short-listed for the 2015 International Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, sold out, and reprinted by Bloomsbury, London in 2021. Vecchio was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Columbus State University. She's received over 50 grants and awards and left a gallery director position to return to making art - concentrating on film. She was awarded an artist residency at Caldera (Oregon) to support the transition. Vecchio serves as an award nominator and panelist for multiple national art foundations, residences, and organizations. She has degrees from Mount Holyoke College, Bard MFA, School of Art Institute of Chicago, and European Graduate School, where she was Sandy Stone’s student.

Aurelia Gómez De Unamuno

Aurelia Gómez De Unamuno received her Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Pittsburgh, and Licenciatura in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her research focuses on cultural and literary productions related to social movements, in particular, the Student Movement of 1968 and the 1970's Guerrilla Warfare in Mexico; as well as Memory and State violence in Latin America. Her current work addresses ongoing debates in Mexico about memory and state violence, analyzing literary and testimonial texts written by former guerrilla fighters. New projects will focus on enforced disappearance and impunity in Mexico as well as the participation of women in the armed struggle in Latin America.

Lina Martínez Hernández

Lina Martínez Hernández, originally from Colombia, is an Assistant Professor in the Spanish Department at Haverford College. Her research focuses on queer aesthetics and politics in the Hispanic Caribbean. She also develops pedagogical collaborations that focus on community engaged learning between Haverford students and Latinx communities in Philadelphia. She recently published the essay "The Queer Hispanic Caribbean: Contemporary Revisions and its Genealogies" as part of New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies. You can visit the website Caribe Cuir, created in collaboration with Haverford Students. Lina is also part of the Philadelphia Language Justice Collective and works as a community interpreter with multiple organizations serving Spanish-speaking communities in the area.

John Muse

John Muse writes criticism, teaches visual studies at Haverford College, and makes experimental films, multi-channel installation works, collages, and paintings. Muse is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College where he also directs VCAM (the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media facility) and the Visual Studies Program. Muse has written critical essays about the work of Markus Baenziger, Roland Barthes, Suzanne Bocanegra, Victor Burgin, Nomi Talisman & Dee Hibbert-Jones, Amy Hicks, Roni Horn, Mary Lydon, Yoonmi Nam, Avital Ronell, Dread Scott, Lee Walton, and others. His films are distributed by the Video Data Bank; his writings can be found at academic.edu.

Ryan Warwick

Ryan Warwick is a scholar working at the intersection of intellectual history, critical theory, and classical antiquity. In their recent work, which has been published in Classical Philology and is forthcoming in American Journal of Philology, Ryan focuses on the letters of Marcus Tullius Cicero, attempting to read past this canonical author to understand the many workers that helped create his texts. Ryan has acted as a co-organizer for “You Better Work: Queer Labor and Liberation,” a digital conference convened in 2022 by Queer and the Classical. Look forward also to their presentation entitled “Knowing Tiro: Classics and the Queer Archive” at “Between, beyond, bygone, behind: Queer time in the ancient Mediterranean” a panel taking place during the 2025 Society of Classical Studies annual meeting in Philadelphia. Ryan is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Haverford College, where they also teach in the Writing Program.