Kristal Sotomayor is a bilingual Latina documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and editor. Currently, she is the Communications and Outreach Coordinator for Scribe Video Center and a Festival Programming Coordinator with the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival (PHLAFF). Kristal has assisted with programming for the award-winning PBS documentary film series POV | American Documentary, the Philadelphia Film Festival (PFF), and the documentary-focused Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) in Maine.
Kristal aims to decolonize documentary by working with communities directly affected to promote legislative changes. She is currently working on her first independent short documentary about the historic end to police database sharing organized by Juntos and the Latinx immigrant community in Philadelphia. The documentary began through the Film Scholars Fellowship with Scribe Video Center, co-sponsored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. It was selected for Good Pitch Local: Philadelphia, hosted by the Doc Society, and was awarded an Art & Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation.
Kristal has received the Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival Scholarship, the HCAH Flaherty Seminar Student Fellowship from Haverford College, and the NextDoc Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship from Youth FX and The Carey Institute. Additional awards include the Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellowship and Film Studies Program Fellowship from Bryn Mawr College.
At Bryn Mawr College, Kristal was the Head of the Film Series Committee, curating twice-weekly film screenings on campus, and the Founder and Co-President of the Filmmakers Association, which united student filmmakers and provided workshops on filmmaking basics. Through the Filmmakers Association, she established the first 48 Hour Film Festival, where groups of students create films in a 48 hour timespan. Her Bryn Mawr College thesis short film To My Motherland, about her experiences being a first generation Latina, has screened at film festivals across the United States and Europe. MORE →
