Isabel Herguera

Isabel Herguera is a Spanish artist, filmmaker, cultural manager, professor, and critic. She has won more than 50 awards at various international film festivals. and obtained a master's degree at CalArts. In her 1989 movies Safari and Song of the Round Trip animation, sculpture and video were merged and together created a special work of art.

Career In 1994, she founded an animation studio in Los Angeles. In 2003, she returned to Spain from Los Angeles. In 2003–2011, she was the director of Animac, the International Festival of Animated film of Catalonia in Lleida. She also coordinated the motion picture laboratory of the Arteleku art centre in Donostia-San Sebastian. Over the years, she has served as chair and jury member of various international film festivals.

In 2005 she started as a teacher at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. As a guest animation professor, she worked at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. In 2017 she became a professor of the animation department in Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany.

Herguera's first feature film, Sultana's Dream, was released in 2023. The story is based on a 1905 dystopian fairy-tale by Bangladeshi social activist Begum Rokeya. In this movie she also combined different techniques to underline and emphasize the differences between storylines — watercolour, cut-outs of the shadow theatre and Mehndi. While it was still in the project stage, the film won the 2022 TorinoFilmLab Audience Design Award of the European Work in Progress in Cologne platform and received a €378,000 grant from the Spanish Film Institute.

Filmography Safari (1989); Song of a Round Trip (1989); La Gallina Ciega (2005); Ámár (2010); Under the Pillow (2012 short); Winter Love (2015); Sailor's Grave (2016) Sultana's Dream (2023).