Dolissa Medina is a filmmaker, writer, and organizer from the borderlands of South Texas. Exploring themes of belonging and home, her experimental documentaries draw from journalism, found footage practice, and essay film traditions to interrogate how legacies of history affect experiences of place. Often engaged in queer world mending through mythology, folklore, and confrontations with mortality, Medina’s films have screened at venues including Rotterdam International Film Festival, MIX-NYC, and Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, where she was also selected as an Oberhausen Seminar participant.
A Fulbright Fellow, Medina has received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, LEF, Puffin Foundation, and others.
Medina received her MFA in Visual Art from UC-San Diego and her B.A. in Journalism from San Francisco State University, where she minored in History.
She is currently in production on her first feature, a personal documentary weaving 1980s history with a contemporary portrait of her hometown of Brownsville, Texas, a contested axis of migration and experimental rockets to Mars.
She is also founder of Grito Viejito, an interdisciplinary artist collective using a Mexican folk dance to stage dialogues around health, HIV histories, and queer futures. The project’s first video, “Viejito/Enfermito/Grito (Old Man/Sick Man/Shout),” is commissioned by Visual AIDS and will premiere on World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art 2023 in more than 150 venues.