Elena Herminia Guzman

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and African Diaspora Studies
WSRP Research Associate 2023–24
Elena Guzman WSRP RA

Home institution

Indiana University Bloomington

Research project

Chimera Geographies: Black Spiritual Borderland Performances of the Caribbean

This project explores the way Black women and non-binary people through the Caribbean and its diaspora use spiritual and ritual performance within African Diasporic Religions, including Santeria, Haitian Vodou, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, 21 Divisions, and Obeah, as a means to forge interstitial geographies of the African diaspora.

Profile

Elena Guzman is an Afro-Boricua filmmaker, educator, and scholar raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University and is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her manuscript, "Chimera Geographies: Black Feminist Borderland Performances," focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religion as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings. Her work has been published in Feminist Anthropology, NACLA, and Cultural Anthropology’s Screening Room.

In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a documentary filmmaker. She co-directed a film entitled Bronx Lives (2014) that explores homelessness for Latinx and African Americans in New York. Her work has been shown at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, Good Pitch Philadelphia, and Blackstar Film Festival and she has received grants from Leeway Foundation, Independent Public Media Foundation, Velocity Fund, Scribe Foundation, Independent Cornell Council for the Arts, Society for the Humanities, and Haverford College. She is also the director of the film Smile4Kime, currently in production, an autoethnographic experimental portrait about friendship, mental health, and Afro-Puerto Rican spirituality. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.