Isabel Herguera is an artist, filmmaker, cultural manager, professor, and critic. She has won more than 50 awards at various international film festivals. She graduated from UPV-Bilbao, continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1988, and obtained a master's degree at CalArts. In her 1989 movies ''Safari'' and ''Song of the Round Trip'' animation, sculpture and video were merged and together created a special work of art. In 1994, she founded an animation studio in Los Angeles. In 2003, she returned to Spain from Los Angeles. In 2003–2011, she was the director of Animac, the International Festival of Animated film of Catalonia in Lleida. She also coordinated the motion picture laboratory of the Arteleku art centre in Donostia-San Sebastian. Over the years, she has served as chair and jury member of various international film festivals. In 2005 she started as a teacher at the National Institute of Design in

Ahmedabad Ahmedabad ( ; Gujarati: Amdavad ) is the most populous city in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is the administrative headquarters of the Ahmedabad district and the seat of the Gujarat High Court. Ahmedabad's population of 5,570,585 (per t ...

, India. As a guest animation professor, she worked at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing,

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. In 2017 she became a professor of the animation department in Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany. In 2012, she became one of the 12 most celebrated Basque filmmakers and directed one chapter of ''Kalebegiak'', a movie that comprised 12 different perspectives on

San Sebastián San Sebastian, officially known as Donostia–San Sebastián (names in both local languages: ''Donostia'' () and ''San Sebastián'' ()) is a city and Municipalities of Spain, municipality located in the Basque Country (autonomous community), B ...

. Herguera's first feature film, ''

Sultana's Dream ''Sultana's Dream'' is a 1905 Bengali feminist utopian story in English, written by Begum Rokeya, also known as Rokeya Sahkawat Hossain, a Muslim feminist, writer and social reformer from Bengal. It was published in the same year in Madras-bas ...

'', was released in 2023. The story is based on a 1905 dystopian fairy-tale by Bengali social activist Begum Rokeya. In this movie she also combined different techniques to underline and emphasize the differences between storylines — watercolour, cut-outs of the shadow theatre and Mehndi. While it was still in the project stage, the film won the 2022 TorinoFilmLab Audience Design Award of the European Work in Progress in Cologne platform and received a €378,000 grant from the Spanish Film Institute.

Filmography

* Safari (1989); * Song of a Round Trip (1989); * La Gallina Ciega (2005); * Ámár (2010); * Under the Pillow (2012 short); * Winter Love (2015); * Sailor's Grave (2016) * ''

(2023).

References

Sources

* * 1961 births Living people Spanish film directors Film directors from the Basque Country (autonomous community) University of the Basque Country alumni Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumni California Institute of the Arts alumni {{Spain-film-director-stub