GABRIEL DURAN

Gabriel Duran is the president and founder of FDCLA (Festival de Cine Latino Americano). This nonprofit organization hosts the largest international Latino Film Festival in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Since its inception in 2015, FDCLA has consistently showcased outstanding films from across Latin America, bringing them to the forefront of the local film scene.

In addition to his leadership at FDCLA – Texas, Gabriel co-founded Vivid Vita Events LLC in 2018, a company dedicated to organizing Latino-focused events, including the annual Fiesta Charra, a charreada and music series held in Lewisville, TX.

Gabriel also serves as an Assistant Professor in the Media Arts department at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, where he teaches screenwriting and film production with a focus on narrative filmmaking. His passion lies in connecting the local community with Latino arts, fostering cultural expression and celebration.

MARIELENA RESENDIZ

Born and raised in South Texas, Marielena Resendiz (MEHR-ee-uh-LAY-nuh ree-SEHN-deez) made her way to Denton in 1997 and became a part of the University of North Texas staff.

Marielena has served as the mentor, festival & event coordinator for Media Arts and has produced many events to promote student outreach. She works with incoming students allowing them to have opportunities in workshops, and productions before they are actual majors in our department. She’s done such a great job working with these students that she received a Student Success Award from the university.

Marielena also serves as the Festival’s Executive Producer for the annual Festival de Cine Latino Americano (FDCLA). a nonprofit organization and DFW’s largest international Latino Film Festival. FDCLA was established in 2015, and to this day, the festival continues to springboard quality films from all over Latin America into the forefront.

DR. JENNIFER GÓMEZ MENJÍVAR

Dr. Jennifer Gómez Menjívar’s research interests include Indigenous Sovereignty Media, Latin American and Latinx Media, Grassroots and Participatory Media Practices, Cinematic Adaptation, Digital Culture, Critical Theory, and Media Linguistics. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin/x American Cultural Studies from The Ohio State University, and her scholarly training is in the production, circulation, and reception of texts, from traditional print to contemporary digital. For the last several years, her research has been concerned with how Indigenous and Black communities use new media to challenge the typical discussions of minority communities as disenfranchised and powerless. These projects are concerned with how phenomena like hashtag movements, TikTok journalism, YouTube videos, Twitter memes, and Facebook groups are increasingly necessary in concrete undertakings such as autonomy and self-governance, language revitalization, minority entrepreneurship, and grassroots organizing.

She came to UNT with more than 18 years of teaching experience at the college level, along with a history of service to the profession, and life experiences that include internships at the UNECE in Geneva, Switzerland, and the UNDP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. In her free time, she enjoys cheering for her boys at their Little League games and listening to true crime podcasts.

DR. ROSALVA RESENDIZ

Rosalva Resendiz holds a Ph.D. in sociology/social (dis)organization theory from Texas Woman’s University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, previously known as the University of Texas-Pan American. Dr. Resendiz identifies as Chicanx indigenous mestiza, focusing on social justice, critical criminology, critical race theory, decoloniality, postcolonial studies, Chicana
feminism, Mexican American/Border Studies, and organized crime.

She recently co-edited Criminology Throughout History: Critical Readings (2021) and Gender, Crime & Justice: Critical and Feminist Perspectives (2021). She also has a co-authored book chapter in BIPOC Alliances: Building Communities and Curricula (2022): “Reclaiming Our Indigeneity: Deconstructing Settler Myths within Our Family.”

She is also involved in media arts, having co-produced and co-directed the documentary El Muro|The Wall (2017) with her nephew Dr. Ramon Resendiz. The film foregrounds the story of a Lipan Apache Elder’s resistance to building the border wall on her ancestral lands on the Texas/Mexico border. She has also assisted as a producer on a documentary short by Director Abbey Hoekzema, an Associate Professor from Georgia Southern University. The documentary short, Migrant was screened at various film festivals in 2019.

This past academic year, she was invited to organize the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies-Tejas Foco Conference held on March 23-25th, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas. The conference theme focused on “Confronting/Resisting the Colonizer Within: A History of Violence, Discrimination/Oppression and Shame.” She is also the NACCS Tejas Foco Caucus Chair, and most currently, she is co-editing a special issue for the Rio Bravo Journal on “Inter/weaving, Inter/lacing Consciousness & Resistance: Decolonizing Practices, Intersectionality & Aesthetics.”

ALEX GARCIA TOPETE

Alex Garcia Topete is a writer and filmmaker with more than 15 years of experience working in the creative industries in Mexico and the United States, having worked as transnational line producer for the award-winning film Te Prometo Anarquía (2015), as series development consultant for Sony Pictures Television International (2010), as executive producer for shows on National Public Radio’s digital platform (2010), and as writer-director of nationally-broadcast sketch shows for Mexico’s Televisa del Golfo (2006-2007), among others. He has been the managing partner and chief creative officer of the Dallas-based media production company Nowadays Orange Productions since its establishment in 2011. He has written, directed, and produced several projects, including the independent features Trippers (2010) and Vamps, Blood & Smoking Guns (2012), as well as the award-winning independent sitcom The Realty (2019-), the edutainment web series HablandoTV (2015-) and the Lone Star Emmy-winning docu-series Our Americas (2016-). In addition, Alex has been a curator/programmer since 2007 for several film festivals, including the Dallas International Film Festival and the Festival de Cine Latino Americano of North Texas (FDCLA), of which he’s an original co-founder.

Alex is also a researcher and entrepreneur with a doctorate in Arts, Technology and Emerging Communications and a master’s degree in Innovation & Entrepreneurship from the University of Texas at Dallas. His research and expertise focus on transdisciplinary intelligence & collaboration methodologies, particularly as they relate to the creative industries and their relationship to technology, value creation ecosystems, diverse publics, and social impact.

DR. RAMON RESENDIZ

Dr. Ramón Resendiz is a Chicanx documentary filmmaker and media anthropologist from the south Texas U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Media School at Indiana
University. He holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and a Master of Communication from the Native Voices Documentary Media Program at University of Washington. His research interrogates the material and imaginary intersections of
national borders, memory, visual culture, systemic violence, and settler colonialism. His book project, Archival Resistance: Countervisual Documentary Media on the Margins of the U.S., investigates the historic violence, erasures, and undocumentation of critical Latinx Indigeneities
in the national constructions of Texas, Mexico, and the U.S. He critically studies how settler colonial nation states are visualized by archival institutions across the south Texas/U.S. and northern Mexico border landscapes, and the ways visual documentary producers contest and
render these erasures visible.

His filmography includes an array of collaborative community-based documentaries regarding immigration, social justice, human rights issues, Indigenous resistance, and the evidentiary. Chief of these is El Muro | The Wall (2017), a feature-length documentary film project co-produced with the Lipan Apache Band of Texas Tribal Board. The film documented the historic resistance exercised by Lipan Apache/Ndé peoples against colonial occupation and persecution in the south Texas borderlands. It follows Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez’s legal battle against the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security’s (USDHS) use of eminent domain to build the U.S. Border Wall of 2006 on her ancestral lands. His films have been screened across film festivals, community screenings, and academic conferences.

KAT HUERTA-ORTEGA

Kat recently graduated from the University of North Texas with her MFA in Documentary Production and Media Studies. She is a daughter of Mexican immigrants and carries her cultural pride into her works. Her ultimate goal as a storyteller is to tell meaningful stories in unforgettable ways.

So far, she has written and directed the documentary Se Me Ha Dado, a film and love letter to her father, which screened at the North Texas Universities Film Festival in 2022. Her current work includes a second documentary, Doble Identidad, an experimental self-reflexive piece about the complexities of biculturalism.

She became involved with FDCLA-Norte as an intern in 2022 and has now become an active committee member. Her primary responsibility is updating and managing the FDCLA-Norte official website.