Researcher, teacher and independent curator.
Beatriz Leal Riesco is a researcher, critic, and curator specializing in contemporary art and cinema from Africa and its diaspora. In addition to her work as a professor and lecturer, she collaborates with such publications as El País, Cinema Journal, Secuencias, Caracteres, Ars Magazine, Asymptote, Fonseca, Hyperion, Rebelión, Okayafrica, L’Harmattan y Écrans. Since 2011 she has been a programmer for the New York African Film Festival Nueva York and África Imprescindible (Spain). Co-founder of Wallay: Barcelona African Film Festival, la Mostra de cinemas africanos (Brazil) and of the Jornadas de cine africano de Melilla, She was worked as a juror for numerous international film festivals. Co-director with Wendy L. Belcher and Kofi Agawu of the international conference “Semaphores and Surfaces: Reading the New African Cinemas” (Princeton University, 2013). With Mahen Bonetti, she coedited the book Looking Back, Looking Forward: 20 Years of the New York African Film Festival (AFF: 2013); she was coordinator of the volume Cine e Historia: revisiones metodológicas y críticas en la revista El futuro del pasado (July 2014) and the monograph Cine africano contemporáneo with Fernando González García in Secuencias: Revista de Historia del Cine (UAM: 2016).
Member of the international organizations SOCINE and ASA and of the editorial board of the journal CARACTERES, she presently contributes to several international research groups focused on cinema and intertextuality and experimental audiovisual production in Africa. She has taught courses and lectured at Princeton University (USA) Rice (USA), the Wharton School of Business (USA), Laval (Canada), Universidad Pública de Navarra, Alicante, UNED, Universidad de Salamanca and Recife (Brazil). As an independent curator she has worked with such many art centers, including the Artium, Azkuna Zentroa, CCCB, Tabakalera, MACBA, MUSAC, and La Virreina Centre de La Imatge, as well as with many Spanish cinematheques.
