Isabel Herguera is an artist, filmmaker, cultural manager, professor, and critic. She has won more than 50 awards at various international film festivals.[1][2]
She graduated from UPV-Bilbao, continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1988,[3] and obtained a master's degree at CalArts.[4] 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.[1]
In 1994, she founded an animation studio in Los Angeles.[1]
In 2003, she returned to Spain from Los Angeles.[2] 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.[5][1]
Over the years, she has served as chair and jury member of various international film festivals.[6][7][8]
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.[9]
Herguera's first feature film, Sultana's Dream, was released in 2023. The story is based on a 1905 dystopian fairy-tale by Bengali social activist Begum Rokeya.[10] 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.[2][11] 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[12] and received a €378,000 grant from the Spanish Film Institute.[13]
