Alexandra Hidalgo
- Associate Professor, Crow Chair
Alexandra's Affiliations: Constellations
Alexandra Hidalgo is Associate Professor and Crow Chair of English. She is an award-winning Venezuelan writer, filmmaker, theorist, memoirist, and editor. Her intellectual and creative work explores the challenges and immense rewards of sustaining deep-rooted relationships in our familial, friendship, and professional spheres.
Her video book Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition (Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2017) received the 2018 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. She has also edited two collections, Pixelating the Self: Digital Feminist Memoirs (Enculturation Intermezzo, 2018) and Extraordinary Filmmakers: How to Make Films Against All Odds (co-edited with Carole Dean, From the Heart Productions, 2022).
Her in-postproduction feature documentary A Family of Stories received From the Heart Productions’ inaugural “Carole Joyce Award for Excellence in Documentary Storytelling.” Her 2017 short documentary Teta has been the official selection at 30 film festivals in 13 countries and received 8 film festival awards. Vanishing Borders, her 2014 feature documentary, was an official selection at 11 film festivals and 7 universities and received 5 film festival awards.
Her videos and writing have been featured in The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, NPR, The Criterion Collection, and Women and Hollywood. Her scholarship has been published in Kairos, Composition Studies, Enculturation, and Peitho, among others. Her 2019 video essay, “Motherhood on the Screen: An Exploration of Wounds Opened and Closed Through Home Video,” received the 2020 Kairos Best Webtext Award.
She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the digital publication agnès films: supporting women and feminist filmmakers and of the peer-reviewed journal constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space. She has a PhD in English from Purdue University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University.
You can learn more about her work on her website and on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Representative Publications
“Embodying Mentorship and Friendship: A Love Letter to Villanueva’s ‘Tradition and Change.’” 50th Anniversary Special Issue of Composition Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2022, pp. 79-83.
“A Response to Cushman, Baca, and García’s College English Introduction.” constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place, vol. 3, Fall 2021.
Hidalgo, Alexandra, Catheryn Jennings, and Ana Milena Ribero. “Constellating Stories and Counterstories: Cultural Rhetorics Scholarship Principles.” Moderated by Kimberly Wieser. constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing place, issue 4, 2021.
“Feedback As an Act of Love: How to Transform Storytelling By Listening to Others.” MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture. 14 June 2021.
“How ‘Gilmore Girls’ Rescued My Relationship with My Mother.” Women and Hollywood. 13 Oct. 2020.
“Godmotherly Love.” The Complete Films of Agnès Varda. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2020, pp. 115-129.
“Creating our Pasts Together: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Memoir.” Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018.
Hidalgo, Alexandra and Katie Grimes. “A Feminist Approach to Social Media.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 12, no. 2. 2017.
“Family Archives and the Rhetoric of Loss.” Provocations: Reconstructing the Archive. Edited by Patrick Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2016.
“Alto Precio: Love, Loss, and Rebellion in Raising Bilingual Children.” Technoculture: An Online Journal of Technology in Society, vol. 6. 2016.
“Vanishing Fronteras: A Call for Documentary Filmmaking in Cultural Rhetorics (con la ayuda de Anzaldúa).” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol. 21, 2016.
“Race, Rhetoric, and the State Special Issue.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. Edited by Alexandra Hidalgo and Donnie Johnson Sackey, vol. 5 no. 2. Fall 2015.
“National Identity, Normalization, and Equilibrium: The Rhetoric of Breast Implants in Venezuela.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol. 13, 2012.