Isabel Herguera | |
|---|---|
 Isabel Herguera | |
| Born | 1961 |
| Nationality | Spain |
| Occupation | Film Director |
| Notable work | Sultana’s Dream |
Isabel Herguera is a Spanish artist, filmmaker, cultural manager, professor, and critic. She has won more than 50 awards at various international film festivals. [1] [2]
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She graduated from UPV-Bilbao, continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1988, [3] and obtained a master's degree at CalArts. [4] In her 1989 movies Safari and Song of the Round Trip animation, sculpture and video were merged and together created a special work of art. [1]
In 1994, she founded an animation studio in Los Angeles. [1]
In 2003, she returned to Spain from Los Angeles. [2] In 2003–2011, she was the director of Animac, the International Festival of Animated film of Catalonia in Lleida. She also coordinated the motion picture laboratory of the Arteleku art centre in Donostia-San Sebastian. [5] [1]
Over the years, she has served as chair and jury member of various international film festivals. [6] [7] [8]
In 2005 she started as a teacher at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. As a guest animation professor, she worked at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. In 2017 she became a professor of the animation department in Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany. [2] [4] [3]
In 2012, she became one of the 12 most celebrated Basque filmmakers and directed one chapter of Kalebegiak, a movie that comprised 12 different perspectives on San Sebastián. [9]
Herguera's first feature film, Sultana's Dream , was released in 2023. The story is based on a 1905 dystopian fairy-tale by Bangladeshi social activist Begum Rokeya. [10] In this movie she also combined different techniques to underline and emphasize the differences between storylines — watercolour, cut-outs of the shadow theatre and Mehndi. [2] [11] While it was still in the project stage, the film won the 2022 TorinoFilmLab Audience Design Award of the European Work in Progress in Cologne platform [12] and received a €378,000 grant from the Spanish Film Institute. [13]
