Lourdes Portillo’s Selena Films

Lourdes Portillo

Mexico-born and Chicana identified, Lourdes Portillo is a writer / director / producer of films focused on the search for Latino identity. She has worked in a richly varied range of forms, from television documentary to satirical video-film collage.

Candice D'Meza

Candice D’Meza (B.A. Black Studies; MPA) is an actor, playwright, multi-disciplinary artist and mother of two based in Houston, Texas. A proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association, she has been called one of the “Seven Young Houston Theater Actors To Watch” and awarded the 2018 Best Utility Player Award by the Houston Press. Social practice in nature, her projects manifest as participatory theatre performance, workshops, and audio-visual installation. Her artistry aims to activate the public space for the reclamation and repatriation of self through song, dance, theatrical performance, audio-visual installation, diary/memoir, and film. Her work explores themes related to identity, African spiritual technologies of connection, land and water. One such project currently in development ,“Fatherland: A Recursive Memoir Mythology Play”, grant funded by the City of Houston, is an audiovisual immersive performance that serves as a community grief ritual for all those who have lost an emotional or physical homeland—by force or by fate.

Currently, her creative writing work explores the uses of fantasy and imagination as a radical liberatory practice. Her ongoing series of liberatory micro-plays, “30 Ways To Get Free”, uses speculative fiction, sci-fi, and afro-futurism to imagine liberated Blackness across the expanse of time. Some of these microplays have been published by The Acentos Review, and are to be filmed and streamed as a part of Catastrophic Theater’s 2020-2021 theater season.

Alyssa Knoles

Alyssa Knoles is a Houston based filmmaker, editor, and content creator. A recent college graduate with a B.A. in Television-Radio from Ithaca College. A Chicana born and raised in Houston’s East End. She is currently a Non-Linear Editor at ABC13 Houston, and previously interned with the Houston Cinema Arts Society as a Video Intern. With a wide range of experience from filmmaking, editing, and public relations her goal is to create content that inspires, educates, and uplifts others.