Biography

Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua director and producer raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES.  As an educator, she teaches feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, production, and visual anthropology. Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others. She is the director and producer of the film Smile4Kime (2023), a short experimental hybrid documentary that uses animation and live-action footage to tell the stories of how two friends transcend, time, space, and even death to find that their friendship lives on. The film received an honorable mention for the Jean Rouch Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival and was nominated for the LOLA Shorts Award at the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival. Smile4Kime will have its international broadcast premiere on AfroPop, PBS. She is also producing a docuseries called Conjure that explores the traditions of African American Hoodoo in the United States. She is a co-founder of Ethnocine Collective, a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and a producer for the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films. 

Crossroads Arts Fellows Project

Oríkì Oshun

Oríkì Oshun is a visual praise poem to the Orisha Oshun. In Yoruba-based religions, Orishas are spiritual intermediaries between humans and the Supreme Being, Olodumare. They reign over aspects of life and nature such as the ocean, motherhood, rivers, roads, and much more. Inspired by the Yoruba performance praise performance tradition, Oríkì Oshun is an experimental sacred tapestry that brings together rituals, sacred symbols, drumming, and interviews with devotees to offer praise to Oshun. Created in collaboration with Oshun, the film is a genre of filmmaking I call cinéritual that uses divination, memory, and ritual as a part of the filmmaking process. Oríkì Oshun is part of a quartet of experimental shorts dedicated to four Orishas: Elegua, Obatala, Yemaya, and Oshun.