Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico) projects grapple with the slippery distinctions between ethnography, fiction, and documentary film and examine the symbolic and material histories of the communities she observes with her camera.

Her residency and exhibition at the New Museum is presented in the Fifth Floor gallery as part of the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY, and explores the ways in which our connections to the past are actively produced, maintained, and refuted. In this exhibition, she premieres a new body of work, including a series of 16mm portraits of anthropologists, activists, and artists working in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Santiago Muñoz’s films capture the aspirations and imagined futures of those who are deeply invested in alternative models of being, using them as allegories for larger political possibilities in the region.