Cecilia Araneda
Executive & Artistic Director (she/her)
Appointed in 2025
Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Cecilia Araneda’s works have screened at festivals and venues such as Rotterdam, Visions du Reél, Ann Arbor, Jihlava, Uppsala, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Images and TIFF Wavelengths. Aesthetically, Araneda’s art practice is strongly rooted in the examination of private and public memory as it connects to identity, consciously working against the idea of the fully controlled image. Her family’s experience fleeing Chile’s military dictatorship and arriving in Canada as refugees also plays a large role in her body of work. Most well-known for her work in analogue film, Araneda works in experimental, documentary and fiction forms.
Araneda is also a national award-winning media art curator. In 2019, she became the first-ever curator from the prairies to be awarded the national Joan Lowndes Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, for the quality of her independent curatorial practice in the visual and media arts. Araneda has curated programs for the WNDX Festival of Moving Image (an organization she co-founded with Solomon Nagler in 2005), the Gimme Some Truth Documentary Festival, the Winnipeg Cinematheque, the FICWALLMAPU Film Festival of the Mapuche Nation, Harbour Collective / ImagineNATIVE and the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba. She has additionally more recently engaged in independent sectoral curatorial research focused on Latin Canadian cinema. This recent multi-year scope culminated in organizing the first ever National Gathering of Latin Canadian Filmmakers in Montreal in 2023, and the release of a post-event memory booklet in 2024.
From 2006 to 2017, Araneda served as Executive Director of the Winnipeg Film Group / Winnipeg Cinematheque, a storied organization within the Winnipeg arts milieu with a budget of over $1M and a permanent staff base of 14, transforming it into a new era of unprecedented artistic clarity, technical excellence, financial growth, stability and inclusion. Among the numerous special projects she directly spearheaded for the Winnipeg Film Group includes the Reflecting Light national conference in 2015, examining the history of the national film production centre system for the organization’s 40th anniversary and featuring 25 visiting filmmakers and curators from across the country. Araneda additionally designed and launched the Mosaic Project for the organization in 2007, a program which contributed to the development of Indigenous, Black and other racialized women filmmakers, Caroline Monnet and Rhayne Vermette among them.
From 2018 to 2020, Araneda took on a two year consulting scope with the Brandon-based Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, directing its Manitoba Digital Initiatives project to support media art development capacity in Manitoba outside of Winnipeg. Artists that Araneda directly mentored under this program include Taylor McArthur and Dallas Flett-Wapash.
Araneda holds a BFA (hons) from York University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and is additionally a three-time alumna of the legendary Film Farm.
