Ilana Lapid is a filmmaker and educator with a strong interest in comparative border cinema and gender issues.  She was born in New York City and grew up in Jerusalem, Ottawa, and Las Cruces, New Mexico.  Lapid is an assistant professor at the Creative Media Institute of New Mexico State University. She holds a BA from Yale and MFA from USC in film production.  Lapid received a Fulbright in Romania to work with visual stories of Roma (Gypsy) children and was an artist in residence at Slifka Center at Yale.  She has directed multiple shorts that won awards at international festivals, including Red Mesa, which won Best Short at the LA Latino International Film Festival.  A feature she co-wrote with Joshua Wheeler, Lordsburg, was a finalist at the Sundance Screenwriter Lab and is in development.  An educator, Lapid is interested in the trans-formative power of visual storytelling, with a focus on cross-border collaborative filmmaking.  Lapid is currently developing the Border Cinema Institute, a summer institute that will involve collaborations between CMI students and film students from several schools in Mexico to make short documentaries about the border.  Lapid’s short film La Catrina, produced by Diana Molina and made for the JUNTOS exhibit Icons and Symbols of the Borderland, was selected for the 2016 Women in Film & Television International Short film Showcase.

​

Website:  www.yochifilm.com