Juana Suarez
Associate Professor; Director, Moving Image Archiving & Preservation Program
Juana Suárez combines careers as a scholar, film critic, and media archivist/preservation activist. Her research interests include Media Preservation, Film Archives, Media Archeology, Administration of Memory Institutions, Film Studies, Latin American/Latino-a Cinema, Cultural Studies and Literature, Women's and Gender Studies, and Immigration Studies.
She is the author of Sitios de Contienda. Producción Cultural y el Discurso de la Violencia (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2010), and Cinembargo Colombia. Ensayos críticos sobre cine y cultura colombiana (Universidad del Valle, 2009; in English Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is the co-editor of Humor in Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the Spanish translator of Paul A. Schroeder-Rodríguez’s Latin American Cinema, A Comparative History (University of California Press, 2016; Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2020). Currently, she is forwarding a research project tentatively entitled Audiovisual Archives, Cultural History and the Digital Turn in Latin America (the title might radically change to Toda la memoria posible).
Working with NYU MIAP colleagues, alumni, and students, she has organized and participated in the NYU - MIAP Audiovisual Preservation Exchange Program (APEX) since 2013. APEX has taken place in Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Greece, and México (Chiapas and Guadalajara). The project has forged partnerships with almost fifty cultural heritage institutions in those countries and it has been a catalyst for collaboration and strengthening of global preservation projects.
From 2015 to 2023, she worked on the preservation of Yuruparí, a Colombian TV series of ethnographic documentaries about Afro-descendant and indigenous heritage and culture filmed in the 1980s; the project has been done in collaboration with Proimágenes and RTVC/ Señal Memoria.
She has also been an advisor and fundraiser for the archival project of the Mujer es Audiovisual collective, supporting the creation of a digital repository of films submitted for their Cine en femenino film festival. She coordinated the collectible set of the restored films of Colombian filmmakers Carlos Mayolo (2015) and Víctor Gaviria (2019).
She is also part of the research group working in the Legacies of United States Information Agency, Moving Images Through International Lenses, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and led by Mark Williams (Dartmouth College); the Under the Shadow of the Empire: Minor Archives and Radical Media Distribution in the Americas, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, led by Susan Lord (Queen’s University). In collaboration with Pratt Institute School of Information, Suárez manages the Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network (DPOE-N), funded by a Mellon Foundation Grant.
In addition to the Board of Directors of the DPOE-N, she is a Trustee for the Flaherty Film Seminar. She has served on the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Board of Directors. Her advocacy is oriented to the awareness of income, gender, and opportunity gaps at the international level so that resources shared, and initiatives created include knowledge and expertise from global geographies and get to be equally distributed. Truly invested in collaboration, she is always ready to start conversations about projects and to talk about how MIAP may support preservation projects for artists, communities, institutions, and major and minor archives.
Recent Scholarship:
“Notes Towards a Digital Repository for the Legacy of Colombian Women Filmmakers”. Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Ed. Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto and Isabel Seguí, 20.3, 207-218.
"Film Preservation, Archives and Film Festivals". Shaping Film Festivals in a Changing World. Eds. Dorota Ostrowska and Tamara Falicov, 67-80. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.
“Making a Case for piratas: Understanding the Complexity of Piracy in Latin America from the Vendor’s Standpoint”. Senses of Cinema. May 2023. With Luisa González, Univ. of Amsterdam.
updated 09 12 2025