THE FILMMAKERS
JOHN J. VALADEZ
Executive Producer
Writer/Director/Producer
The Last Conquistador
John has been producing and directing award winning, nationally broadcast documentaries for PBS and CNN for the past fourteen years. He directed the critically acclaimed film Passin’ It On, which aired nationally on the PBS series POV. He went on to direct the first hour of the PBS series Making Peace and was a producer for the PBS series’ Matters of Race, Visiones: Latino Arts & Culture, and Beyond Brown. John produced High Stakes Testing, an award winning prime-time program for CNN Presents. John is currently writing and directing the third hour of the four hour prime-time PBS series Latin Music USA for WGBH/PBS and the BBC. He is also producing The Head of Joaquin Murrieta for broadcast on PBS.
He has twice been a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, is a Rockefeller Fellow, a PBS/CPB Producers Academy Fellow and currently sits on the Board of Trustees of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. He regularly lectures at universities across the Untied States.
John is also a professional sound recordist, a founding member of the New York Chapter of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) and is a graduate of the film program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
For the past seven years, Cristina has been making short fiction and non-fiction films that have been seen on public television, in galleries, museums, schools and film festivals across the United States including: the Guggenheim, Exit Art Gallery, the Queens Museum, Stanford and Brown Universities
Her award-winning directorial debut, Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela aired on the PBS series ColorVision. She has also produced award-winning satire including: Grandma’s Hip Hop, Lupe From the Block and Amnezac, which can be seen online at www.fulana.org. she is currently developing her first feature film, Love & Monster Trucks.
Cristina has produced films for the Zeum and the Heard Museum. She worked with Gina Prince at the Sundance Institute’s Filmmakers Lab on Love & Basketball, with Griffin Dunne on Practical Magic, with the Pulitzer Prize winning Photo Journalist David Turnley, and Lourdes Portillo on Señorita Extraviada. Cristina is a Rockefeller Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, and a CPB/PBS Producers Academy Fellow. She is a member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, a founding member of fulana, a Latina multi-media collaborative and SubCine, the first Latino self-distribution collective.
CRISTINA IBARRA
Director/Producer
