Kristy Guevara-Flanagan (she/her) is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. Her most recent short film Águilas (co-directed with Maite Zubiaurre; SXSW, PBS, The New Yorker), about a group of volunteers who help recover bodies of missing migrants crossing the border, was short-listed for the 2022 Academy Awards.
Kristy has been making award-winning documentary films that focus on gender and representation for over two decades. Her debut feature, Going on 13 (co-directed with Dawn Valadez, 2009), covering four years in the lives of four adolescent girls premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS. Her follow-up feature, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013), traces the evolution of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society’s anxieties about women’s liberation. Starring Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, and real-life superheroines such as Gloria Steinem and Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre), the film garnered numerous awards, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2013. Her short, What Happened to Her (2016) explores our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen and premiered at Hot Docs, where it received an honorable mention for best short.
Kristy’s work has been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, Fork Films, the International Documentary Association, Latino Public Broadcasting, and California Humanities. Many of her films are currently in educational distribution with Women Make Movies.
