Meet Cristina Kotz Cornejo

For independent filmmaker Cristina Kotz Cornejo, directing a film and directing a class are two sides of the same coin. "I always tell my students I'm a filmmaker first and a professor second, because that's how I see myself," says Kotz Cornejo. "I can't be in front of a class teaching something if I'm not embodying that creative spirit."

Recent Work

Kotz Cornejo's most recent work, 3 Américas, marks her feature film debut as well as her most personal work to date. The film tells the story of América Hart Campos, a 16-year-old who is forced to move from Boston to Buenos Aires after a life-changing event. Based loosely on her own experiences as a child growing up in both Argentina and the United States, Kotz Cornejo spent four years writing the script, which was a two-time semifinalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Encouraging & Advising Students

Kotz Cornejo encourages her students to look to their own lives for creative ideas, and many of them do so with remarkable results. For example, Going Home is a documentary that is being produced, directed, and marketed for distribution by a team led by two of Kotz Cornejo's students. With footage shot in New York, Korea, and Boston, it chronicles one student's search for his birth mother. As part of the filmmaking process, the students raised more than $10,000 to pay for travel and production expenses and established a website to keep supporters and backers up-to-date on the project.

Watching her students' projects come together is one of the most gratifying parts of Kotz Cornejo's job as a professor. "Creative collaboration is a key aspect of filmmaking. Students have to learn how to collaborate artistically, because they're always going to be working with other people."

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