Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Cecilia Araneda’s works have screened at festivals and venues such as Rotterdam, Visions du Réel, Ann Arbor, Ji.hlava, Uppsala, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Images, the Ottawa International Animation Festival and TIFF Wavelengths. Aesthetically, Araneda’s art practice is strongly rooted in the examination of private and public memory as it connects to identity, consciously working against the idea of the fully controlled image. Her family’s experience escaping Chile’s military dictatorship also plays a large role in her body of work. Most well-known for her work in analogue film, Araneda works in experimental, documentary and fiction forms. Araneda’s current artistic research is focused on sustainable approaches in experimental filmmaking, including plant and fruit based eco-processing and direct animation techniques, as well as emerging extensions in the field. This journey also includes sharing her expertise in analogue filmmaking to communities across Canada and in Chile.
Araneda is also a national award-winning media art curator and is a past recipient of the national Canada Council for the Arts Joan Lowndes Prize for curation in the visual and media arts – the only prairie-region curator to have ever won this prize. She was additionally a co-founder of the WNDX Festival of Moving Image and served as Executive Director of the storied Winnipeg Film Group / Winnipeg Cinematheque from 2006 to 2017, when she left the organization to focus on her independent filmmaking and curatorial practices.
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Extended Biography:
Chilean-Canadian filmmaker and curator Cecilia Araneda came to Canada as a child as a refugee together with her family, after they escaped Chile’s military dictatorship. This experience and its aftermath play a large role in her artistic work. Aesthetically, Araneda’s art practice is strongly rooted in the examination of private and public memory as it connects to identity, consciously working against the idea of the fully controlled image. Most well-known her work in analogue film, Araneda works in experimental, documentary and fiction forms.
Araneda holds a BFA (hons) from York University in Toronto and an MFA from UBC in Vancouver, and is additionally a three-time alumna of the fabled Film Farm. She has completed 16 short films to-date, which have been presented at film festivals, artist run centres and art museums around the world, and that have been recognized with various awards and distinctions nationally and internationally.
Among the festivals and organizations that have presented her work include Rotterdam, Visions du Reél, Ann Arbor, Jihlava, Uppsala, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Images and TIFF Wavelengths. Solo career surveys of her work have been presented in Ottawa (2010), Toronto (2017), Winnipeg (2018), and Buenos Aires (2018). She has been awarded art residencies by LIFT: The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto as the inaugural recipient of the Roberto Ariganello Prize (2017) and by Q21 in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier (2019).
Araneda’s debut feature film, INTERSECTION – starring Carmen Aguirre – was released in fall 2022 with screenings in Toronto, Montreal, Portland, Winnipeg, Brussels, Izmir, Ottawa, Vancouver and Philadelphia, among others.
Araneda is also a nationally recognized media art curator. In 2019, she became the first-ever curator from the prairies to be awarded the Joan Lowndes Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, for independent curatorial practice in visual and media arts. In 2017, Araneda was additionally the recipient of an international curatorial residency at the FICWALLMAPU International Indigenous Film Festival of the Mapuche Nation, funded in full by the Canada Council. In 2018, she returned to the festival a year later as a curator to present Caroline Monnet’s first artistic career survey, presented in October 2018 at the festival in Temuco and a week later in Santiago (Chile). Araneda has additionally curated multiple programs over nearly a decade for the WNDX Festival of Moving Image (an organization she co-founded with filmmaker Solomon Nagler).
In June 2020, Araneda served as commissioning curator of the !in.site; exhibition at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, featuring new digital artworks by emerging Indigenous artists Dallas Flett-Wapash and Taylor McArthur. She led the Winnipeg-based Mujer Artista project from 2015 to 2022, connecting Latin women artists from the prairies with collective professional development. Mujer Artista held three group shows at aceartinc., in 2017, 2020 and 2022. In 2023, Araneda left Mujer Artista and the group was re-named MiradorX Art Collective to take it into a new evolution.
From 2006 to 2017, Araneda served as Executive Director of the Winnipeg Film Group / Winnipeg Cinematheque, a storied organization within the Winnipeg arts milieu with a budget of over $1M and a permanent staff base of 14, transforming it into a new era of unprecedented artistic clarity, technical excellence, financial growth and stability, and inclusion. From 2018 to 2020, Araneda took on a two year consulting scope with the Brandon-based Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, spearheading its Manitoba Digital Initiatives project to support media art development capacity in Manitoba outside of Winnipeg.
Araneda has been working as a full-time independent filmmaker and curator since 2020. Her current artistic research is focused on sustainable approaches in experimental film processing, including plant and fruit based eco-processing and direct animation techniques, and emerging extensions in the field. This journey also includes sharing her expertise in analogue filmmaking to communities across Canada and in Chile.