Ximena Cuevas

Ximena Cuevas (Mexico) is an media artist and filmmaker born in Mexico City in 1963. Her father José Luis Cuevas was a leading member of Generación de la Ruptura (The Breakaway Generation), an artistic movement established in opposition to the dominant social-realist aesthetics of the Mexican muralist tradition in the 1950s. The movement influenced numerous artists and writers, including Octavio Paz, Juan García Ponce, and others. Ximena’s childhood was peripatetic, living at different moments with her family in Mexico, Paris, and New York. Her own innovative practice offers a feminist perspective on issues of corruption, gender, and social inequalities, often subverting elements of popular culture to uncover “half-lies of the collective Mexican imagination.” Cuevas’ first experience with the moving image occurred in 1979, when she began restoring previously censored films at the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City. She went on to study film at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University in New York. During the 1980s and 1990s, Cuevas worked on numerous feature films with directors including Costa Gavras, John Huston, John Schlesinger, Arturo Ripstein, and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. She has completed 30+ videos since 1983, which have been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, London Short Film Festival, Sharjah Art Foundation, documenta 14, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Jakarta Biennale, Kunstmuseum Bern, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others. She is the recipient of the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Memorial Award, and grants from the Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Lampiada Foundations; the Mexican National Endowment for Culture and the Arts; and Eastman Kodak’s Worldwide Independent Filmmaker Production Fund. Her work is in private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou. She lives and works in Mexico City and New York.