Irene Sosa Bio

Irene Sosa 2005 in Caracas, Venezuela shooting “Vertical Slum”

A documentary maker from Caracas-Venezuela living and working in USA since 1983, Professor CUNY/ Brooklyn College, Department of Television, Radio and Emerging Media and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Department. Fulbright Scholar 2005
She is working on an interactive documentary about the media activist Dee Dee Halleck and working on short art video-photos.

In 2019 her work was highlighted in the retrospective of Nancy Spero Paper Mirror in the Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and in MOMA PS1.

She completed Vertical Slum in 2016, a project that takes up issues of architecture and culture, and how buildings reflect the ever-changing social reality. The documentary focuses on a building in the heart of Caracas that was left unfinished and abandoned. In 2007 the building was taken over by some 200 families and has since become a “vertical slum” housing some 5,000 people.

Her previous work, Shopping to Belong, explores the search for cultural citizenship in the Latino community through consumerism.

 In 2004 she was commissioned by the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Galicia, Spain to make an anthology of her work on artist Nancy Spero as part of a retrospective of the artist. Two of these documentaries are included in the DVD Spero/Golub produced by Kartemquin Films.

In 1999 she made Sexual Exiles a documentary about gays and lesbians who left their home countries and how they deal with the sense of loss immigrants have for their homeland and how they claim space and their rights in this new society. Her work has been shown in many national and international venues and has received recognition in the press both here and abroad.

 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 and two Claire and Leonard Tow Faculty Research Travel Fellowship

Sosa’s videos have been shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, Centro Cultural Chacao, EXIT ART, Festival Du Films Sur L’Art (Montreal), the Chicago Art Institute, the University of Illinois, The American Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), WNYC Channel 31 NY, Centre George Pompidou Paris-France, and other national and international venues.