Lourdes Portillo

Portillo’s sixteen completed films include the Academy Award and Emmy Award nominated The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1986), La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), Columbus on Trial (1992), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), My McQueen (2004), Al Más Allá (2008), and her first animated film, State of Grace (2013). Her celebrated feature-length film, Señorita Extraviada (2001), a documentary about the disappearance and death of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, received a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Havana International Film Festival, the Nestor Almendros Award at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the Ariel, the Mexican Academy of Film Award.

Portillo's work is influenced by radical cinema. Portillo and many artists of radical cinema focus on the combination of art and politics. These artists approach politics in art, but don't want art to suffer for its inclusion—they strive for a balance of the political and the artistic in their expression.

Portillo was born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, California. She was first exposed to documentary filmmaking while working for an educational film company in Los Angeles. She apprenticed with the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians in San Francisco, and graduated with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985. Afterward, she began her career as a producer and director of films. The political perspectives of her films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian and Chicana woman.

She is a writer, director, and producer of films from television documentary to satirical video-film collage. Portillo got her first filmmaking experience at the age of twenty-one when a friend in Hollywood asked her to help out on a documentary. Her formal training began several years later. She has thus been making award-winning films about Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/a experiences and social justice issues both as a director and screenwriter for about forty years. Since her first film in 1979, After the Earthquake/ Despues del Terremoto, she has produced over 12 works that demonstrate her work as not only a director, but also an activist, artist, and journalist. While the majority of her work is in the documentary film genre, she has also created video installations and screen writings. Her films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.

Lourdes Portillo was born in 1944 in Mexico.