Irene Sosa

Professor, TV and Radio, Brooklyn College

Fulbright Scholar, MFA Film and Television, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Licenciatura in Mass Communication, Universidad Central de Venezuela.  Irene Sosa began working in film in 1982 and since then has made over 30 documentaries. She has also worked as camera-person in film and video, and collaborated with other artists in multimedia installations and dance performances. Her work has been shown in many national and international venues and has received recognition in the press and by others who have taken up her contributions in their writings. An interview with her is part of a book, A New York State of Mind, by Alejandro Varderi (2008) and she is one of the subjects used in a doctoral thesis titled “The Art of Rupture: Émigré; artists in contemporary perspective” (2006). Her most recent piece, “Shopping to Belong” explores the search for cultural citizenship in the Latino community through consumerism. “Shopping to Belong” has been the subject of various articles, the latest of which appeared in 2010 in the University of Barcelona’s online journal http://guionactualidad.uach.cl/spip.php?article4154. She is currently working on a project that explores issues of architecture and culture, and how buildings reflect our ever-changing social reality. The documentary will focus on an award winning building in the heart of Caracas that was left unfinished and abandoned and has recently been taken over and become a “horizontal slum”.  In 2004 she was commissioned by the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Galicia, Spain to make an anthology of her work on Nancy Spero (13 documentaries) as part of a retrospective of the artist. Two of these documentaries are included in the DVD Spero/Golub produced by Kartemquin films. Since its completion in 1999, Sosa’s “Sexual Exiles” has been shown in more than 30 national and international venues, and continues to be invited to festivals and other events. The documentary is about gays and lesbians who left their homeland because of their sexual orientation. Sosa has been the recipient of various grants and awards, including: an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a fellowship from The Andrea Frank Foundation, an Individual Artist grant from the New York State Council for the Arts. She has also received five PSC-CUNY Research Awards as well as a Brooklyn College Creative Achievement Award.