Ximena Cuevas

Ximena Cuevas (born 1963) is a Mexican video performance artist. Her works often explore the social and gender issues facing lesbians in Mexico. Cuevas's videos and films have screened at Sundance, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum,

She is one of the first videoartists in Mexico that was legitimized by cultural institutions. Her films have been shown in festivals such as Sundance, New York Film Festival, and the touring film series, Mexperimental Cinema. Among her noted works is a 1993 video clip entitled Corazon Sangrante. Her works has also being shown in art institutions such as Berkeley Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum of San Diego, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México, New York's Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art, which in 2001 added nine of her works to their video collection.

Biography

Ximena Cuevas was born in 1963 in Mexico City. She is the second daughter of the marriage of Bertha Riestra., a psychologist and cultural promoter and José Luis Cuevas, a visual artist, whom had great influence on the early education of Ximena: “as a small child I was next to his drawing table, fascinated to see all those lines with their own life somehow(...)”

After living with her family different places such as Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Paris, and New York, Cuevas decided work in cinema, first as an assistant and later on, she continued to work with directors such as Konstantinos Costa-Gavras, John Schlesinger, John Huston, and Arturo Ripstein.

In 1979 she began working at the Cineteca Nacional National Film Archive in Mexico City repairing films by cutting scenes censored by the government. This experience inspired her interest in film and the moving image.