Pasadena Residents Among MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winners

PASADENA, CA — This year’s John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipients included a Pasadena-based documentary filmmaker who looks at borderland communities from a Chicana and Latina youth perspective and a second local filmmaker who studies migration, globalization and technology through an activist’s lens.

Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera, both Pasadena residents, will each receive a no-strings-attached $625,000 “Genius Grant” from the foundation.

The two were among an eclectic group of 25 people chosen for this year’s fellowships, a group that included writers, scientists and artists, according to the foundation.

“They demonstrate that creativity has no boundaries,” Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the fellowship, said in a statement. “It happens in all fields of endeavor, among the relatively young and more seasoned, in Iowa and Puerto Rico.”

Ibarra was chosen in part for her work as a documentary filmmaker chronicling the lives of Latino families living in communities on the United States-Mexico border.

“In multi-layered storytelling, [Ibarra] unearths and portrays complicated colonial legacies and cross-border tensions that continue to exist in the community,” the foundation said.

Rivera was chosen for his body of work, which spans several forms of media, that looks at migration issues in the U.S. — from immigration policies to labor exploitation.

“In feature-length and short films, documentaries, music videos and multimedia installations, Rivera straddles traditional forms of documentary and narrative drama and crafts incisive critiques of socioeconomic injustices grounded in an activist orientation,” the foundation said.

Two other Southland residents were named as fellows for their work: internet studies and digital media scholar Safiya Noble and film scholar, archivist and curator Jacqueline Stewart.