SCREENINGS
Mirror/Lens: Women in Film & Women Making Film
Perfect screened at Mirror/Lens: Women in Film & Women Making Film, a festival hosted by Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. Perfect was screened in the Exhibition part of the festival, which ran from October 21 to November 22, 2011 in the Temporary Gallery. It is particularly thrilling that my filmmaking hero Agnès Varda's work was also be screened at Mirror/Lens.
Reynolda Film Festival
Perfect was a finalist for the Documentary Category at the Reynolda Film Festival at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The film screened on March 31 at 3pm. We were very excited since this was our first festival screening!
Venzuelan Premiere
Perfect screened at the Caracas Theater Club on December 29, 2010. The premiere was attended by some of the documentary's participants, as well as crew members, most of whom were watching the film for the first time. The screening was followed by a Q & A session that quickly turned into a conversation about gender and the prevalence of breast implants in Venezuela, with almost all attendees voicing their opinions. The dialogue went on for two hours, showing how important this topic is to Venezuelans.
University of Central Florida, Orlando
The University of Central Florida’s Hispanic American Student Association (HASA) sponsored a screening of Perfect on September 22, 2010. Associate Professor of Latina/o Literature and Writing, Cecilia Milanés, chaired the panel that followed, featuring members of the Women's Studies Department and Lambda Theta Alpha, the country's first Latina Academic Sorority. For the complete press release, please click here.
Hudson Valley, New York Screening
Perfect was screened at artist Spencer Tunick's studio on Sunday, January 3, 2010.
American Premiere
Perfect premiered at Purdue University on October 2, 2009. The film was followed by a panel with myself, Patricia Sullivan and Jenny Bay from the English Department, and Patricia Hart from the Spanish Department and Film and Video Studies. We had over 100 people in attendance and over an hour of questions after the panel, so it felt like a wonderful beginning for the film.
CONFERENCES
Conference on College Communication and Composition
I will present "National Pride, Equilibrium and Freedom: The Rhetoric of Breast Implants in Venezuela" as part of the "The Contested Female Body: Competition, (Trans)National Identity & Wholeness in the Rhetorics of Plastic Surgery" panel at CCCC this April. The presentation is an analysis of the arguments that Perfect's participants use when explaining Venezuela's fascination with breast implants.
Feministms and Rhetorics
Scenes from Perfect were screened at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference at Michigan State University in October, 2009 as part of a panel titled, "Beautiful Like Me: Rhetoric of, in, and around the Body."
IN THE CLASSROOM
Purdue University
Kendall Leon, Assistant Professor of English, uses Perfect in her Gender, Rhetoric and the Body Seminar in order to demonstrate to graduate students how to include theories on the gendered body as part of their research methodology.
University of Central Florida
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Associate Professor of English, uses Perfect in her Honors Freshman Composition, Latina/o
Literature and Hispanic Women Writers courses as part of the classes' exploration of media representations of Latina/os.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Basuli Deb, Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies, uses Perfect in her Introduction to Women's Studies course to help her students gain a transnational feminist perspective on how women's sexuality is controlled by the male gaze in various cultures. On the day they watch the film, I have an in-class skype conversation with her students, which Deb says stimulates student thinking about the role of media in feminist activism.