Gilliam de la Torre (Gigi) is a Cuban visual artist focused on Cinematography and Photography. She studied cinematography at University of the Arts (ISA) in Havana and completed DP workshops at EICTV San Antonio de los Baños and documentary studies at TISCH NYU. She was awarded a fellowship for the Flaherty Documentary Seminar on 2012.
Her cinematographic career has been centered on her passion for documentaries, working as DP in features like “Cuban Food Stories” (premiered at Berlinale Film Festival, exhibited in a dozen of festivals including FICG, Guadalajara, Seattle, Newport… featured on Amazon Prime, iTunes, DVD and Delta Airlines), “Meeting Jim” (premiered at the Edinburg Film Festival and exhibited in several festivals around the globe including Odessa, HOF, SEMINCI Valladolid, Central Scotland Documentary Fest, Krakow, Parnu Film Fest… Winner of the Best Documentary Award at Boston Turkish Film Festival 2020. Broadcasted on prime time by BBC Scotland and the rest of UK and also on BLU TV on Turkey). “Me Japanese” (in post, winner of the Wave Maker Grant by Cannonball and Andy Warhol Foundation), “Garage Rendevouz” on the closure of the oldest flea market in Manhattan, NY and “Call me Lucky” (currently in post, sponsored by Women Make Movies).
Additional film work includes art and dance related videos like “Once Broken” (a collaboration with visual artist Kate Gourney), “Trinity of Selves” and “Story of O” (collaboratiosn with composer Nina Fukuoka, dancer Gabriela Burdsall and theater director and William Ruiz, from Living Away Art platform). Her photographs have been published by Shots, Theater Geist and Tablas magazines.
Her photographic work centers in two main directions; one related to constructed scenarios, creating new realities by de-contextualizing the human body and quotidian objects, mostly in BW. The other focus is derived from a documentary eye that perceives the human presence in daily, almost banal scenes; their relationships between them and their environment in a subtle way that, combined with her poetic writing, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, bestow a personal meaning to the images that emerge as a collective imaginary.
Gigi is currently at work on healing and migration in the context during the global pandemic for the production of a video visual poem titled “Primavera Adentro” and the development of her Photographic Book “A Way of Leaving”. She resides between Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York and Vedado in Havana.
