Alex Rivera is a filmmaker who has been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, a cyberpunk thriller set in Mexico, Sleep Dealer, won awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Amnesty International Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid, The Infiltrators, won both the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovators Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the Best Documentary Feature award at the Blackstar Film Festival, and is currently being developed as a scripted series by Blumhouse Television.
Other recent collaborations include a series of music videos produced by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network with artists including Manu Chao, La Santa Cecilia and Aloe Blacc, which have collectively received over 25 million views.
Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Sundance, Creative Capital, and many others. Alex studied at Hampshire College, was the Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and is currently a distinguished lecturer of media studies at Queens College. He is a recipient of the 2021 MacArthur Genius Grant.
