Biography

Kimberly is the oldest of three from Pasadena, California to a Colombian immigrant father and a native Californian mother with Irish heritage. Her bi-cultural identity informs much of her work, both in activism and video. Kimberly's video work deals with issues such as national, racial and sexual identities, immigration, assimilation, and social justice, particularly in the Latino community.

Throughout her undergraduate experience at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, Kimberly's studies were focused on Spanish Language and Culture, Chicano Studies, Gender/Feminist Studies, and Media Studies. She had always been in love with the arts, but had never considered studying film because she didn’t imagine a way for it to line up with her interests in grassroots community organizing. She found at Pitzer that the way that she could share her dedication to community involvement and activism with as many people as possible was through digital video, resulting in many documentary videos surrounding themes of diaspora, worker and immigrant rights, women’s rights, urban and youth social movements, identity, and the importance of education, specifically for educationally underrepresented groups. Much of Kimberly's previous work was filmed in Ecuador and Colombia, as well as in Southern California.

Kimberly considers herself a media arts activist. She has worked with youth in empowerment projects, developing curriculum for mural and art classes for incarcerated youth and directing an intercultural video pen-pal web exchange between young women in Quito, Ecuador and young Chicana women in Pomona, California. As an educator/activist, she developed an organization in 2003 called Speak Out For Them (SOFT) to educate people about the current femicides (systematic killing of women) in Latin America. Kimberly anticipates carrying forward work surrounding this issue into her graduate studies for her thesis project, which she will film in Guatemala the summer of 2008.