Robert Giard Foundation Announces 2013-2014 Fellowship Winner

May 31, 2013

Carmen Oquendo-Villar Receives $7,500 For Her Documentary Diana De Santa Fe

Left to right: Guest Tony Kushner, 2013 Giard Fellow Carmen Oquendo-Villar, 2012 Fellow Cary Cronenwett, 2011 Fellow Yoruba Richen, and Board President Carl Sylvestre at the May 22 benefit.

New York, NY (May 27, 2013) – The Robert Giard Foundation, in partnership with The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) of the City University of New York, announced the 2013 – 2014 Robert Giard Fellowship recipient, filmmaker Carmen Oquendo-Villar, at its annual benefit on May 22, 2013. The guest of honor and speaker at the benefit, held in support of the fellowship, was Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner.

Ms. Oquendo-Villar receives The Robert Giard Fellowship grant of $7,500 to allow her to prepare for the principal photography stage of her project, enabling her to recruit a film crew with experience shooting quality footage in precarious situations such as conflict/war zones.

Ms. Oquendo-Villar’s documentary, Diana de Santa Fe, follows Diana Navarro, a transgender sex worker in Colombia, working in Santa Fe, a barrio close to Bogota’s financial district. The film examines Diana’s daily life as she reaches out to the other sex workers in need, in effect becoming a leader and caregiver in her community, abandoning sex work as her primary source of income.  The film will follow the process though which Diana transforms her home in Santa Fe into a center for battered and injured sex workers.

From this year’s application pool of over 70 entries from around the world, The Robert Giard Foundation jury also cited an honorable mention to Matt Wolf for his documentary-in-progress The Harry Weintraub Project. The film explores attorney Harry Weintraub’s archiving of personal photographs, journals, scrapbooks and pornography – intimate possessions of gay men dying in the early days of the AIDS epidemic – discarded by their families. The archive later expanded to include those of gay men from the 19th century to the present day.

The Robert Giard Foundation thanks its supporters for making this annual fellowship possible.