Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Cecilia Araneda’s works have screened at festivals and venues such as Rotterdam, Visions du Réel, Ann Arbor, Ji.hlava, Uppsala, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Images, the Ottawa International Animation Festival and TIFF Wavelengths. Aesthetically, Araneda’s art practice is strongly rooted in the examination of private and public memory as it connects to identity, consciously working against the idea of the fully controlled image. Her family’s experience escaping Chile’s military dictatorship also plays a large role in her body of work. Most well-known for her work in analogue film, Araneda works in experimental, documentary and fiction forms. Araneda’s current artistic research is focused on sustainable approaches in experimental filmmaking, including plant and fruit based eco-processing and direct animation techniques, as well as emerging extensions in the field. This journey also includes sharing her expertise in analogue filmmaking to communities across Canada and in Chile.

Araneda is also a national award-winning media art curator and is a past recipient of the national Canada Council for the Arts Joan Lowndes Prize for curation in the visual and media arts – the only prairie-region curator to have ever won this prize. She was additionally a co-founder of the WNDX Festival of Moving Image and served as Executive Director of the storied Winnipeg Film Group / Winnipeg Cinematheque from 2006 to 2017, when she left the organization to focus on her independent filmmaking and curatorial practices.