Beatriz Leal

Beatriz Leal Riesco is an independent researcher, teacher, critic and programmer specialising in African, European and Middle Eastern contemporary art and cinema. She combines her work as a conference speaker and teacher with her writing activities, publishing articles in a wide range of newspapers and academic journals, including El País, Cinema Journal, Secuencias, Caracteres, Ars Magazine, Asymptote, Hyperion, Rebelión, GuinGuinBali and Okayafrica. She divides her time between the USA and Europe, and since 2011 has also been a programmer for the New York African Film Festival. Alongside Wendy L. Belcher and Kofi Agawu, in 2013 she co-directed the international conference "Semaphores and Surfaces: Reading the New African Cinemas” (Princeton University), and that same year also coedited Looking Back, Looking Forward: 20 Years of the New York African Film Festival (AFF: 2013), in collaboration with Mahen Bonetti. In 2014 she coordinated the monographic work Cine e Historia: revisiones metodológicas y críticas in the journal El futuro del pasado (July 2014), and also worked with Fernando González García on another monographic work entitled Cine africano contemporáneo, which is due to be published in Secuencias. Revista de Historia del Cine (UAM: 2016) in the near future. Her most recent curating projects include the Poesía, memoria y conflicto. Películas africanas ante el siglo XXI series and the Mujeres cineastas africanas contemporáneas cycle at the MUSAC (León, March 2015 and April-May 2016); the Cine de Melilla cycle at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York, May 2015); various African experimental film sessions for Xcèntric (CCCB, Barcelona, 2015-2016); a retrospective of the Italian filmmaker Elio Petri at the Spanish Film Library (Madrid, March 2015); the programming of the Serie de cines africanos contemporáneos, a retrospective of the director Eran Riklis for the Navarra Film Library (November and December 2015/2016) and the cycle Cowboys, bailes y funerales: cines africanos postcoloniales at the Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao (January 2016).