Dr. Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar, and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. She served as the director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race from 2009-2016.

Negrón-Muntaner’s work spans multiple disciplines and practices, including cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics. Her work focuses on a comparative exploration of coloniality in the Americas, with special attention to the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Her publications include: Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism(1997), Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era (2007), The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S Media (2014), The Latino Disconnect: Latinos in the Era of Media Mergers (2016), Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America (2017), and The Essential Manuel Ramos Otero (2020).

Among her films are AIDS in the Barrio: Eso no me pasa a mí (1989, co-directed with Peter Biella), about the social and cultural context of the AIDS epidemic in a Puerto Rican community in North Philadelphia; Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1995 Whitney Biennial, Audience Award at the 1995 San Juan CinemaFest and a Merit Selection at the 1995 Latin American Studies Association Film Festival), the first Puerto Rican film to examine issues of race, gender, and homophobia in the wake of mass migration. She has most recently completed Small City, Big Change (2013) a short video based on her brief about the influence of Latino advocacy efforts on behalf of LGBTQ civil rights struggles; War for Guam (2015), a public television documentary about the impact and legacy of World War II in Guam; and Life Outside (2016) a short about aging in prison. In 2016, the American Academy of Motion Pictures began the "Frances Negrón-Muntaner Collection" with the preservation of Brincando el charco.

Negrón-Muntaner has also helped establish institutions and programs dedicated to disseminating the work of filmmakers and intellectuals. She is the founder of Miami Light Project's Filmmakers Workshop, and a founding board member and former chair of NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. From 2016-2019, she served as the director of Unpayable Debt, a working group at Columbia University that studied debt regimes in the world. During her tenure, she co-created “Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean” and in 2019, she launched Valor y Cambio, an art, digital storytelling and just economy project in Puerto Rico that is currently on tour in New York (valorymcambio.org).

For her work as a scholar and filmmaker, Negrón-Muntaner has received several fellowships, including the Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, Pew, and Chang-Chavkin. Major funders such as Social Science Research Council, Andy Warhol Foundation, and Independent Television Service have also supported her work. She has similarly received various recognitions, including the United Nations' Rapid Response Media Mechanism designation as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies (2008); the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University's most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012), an inaugural OZY Educator Award (2017), the Latin American Studies Association’s Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award (2019), the Premio Borimix from the Society for Educational Arts in New York (2019), and the Bigs & Littles Impact Award (2020) for her work as a mentor, artist, and scholar.