Elena Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She is currently writing her book manuscript tentatively titled, Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderland Performances of the Afro-Caribbean, which focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions to forge geographies that counter landscapes of oppression. As an educator, she teaches Black feminism, performance, feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, autoethnography, border/land studies, and visual anthropology.
In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a filmmaker whose work explores the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health. Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others. She is the director and producer of the film Smile4Kime (2023), a short experimental hybrid documentary that uses animation and live-action footage to tell the stories of how two friends transcend, time, space, and even death to find that their friendship lives on. This film was shown at Indie Memphis, BronzeLens Film Festival, and Hayti Heritage Film Festival, amongst others. It also received an Honorable Mention for the Jean Rouch award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival and was nominated for the LOLA Shorts Award at the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival. Her second film, Oriki Oshun (2025) is a short experimental film that pays homage to the mother of the sweet waters. Oshun. Weaving different Pataki (sacred stories) of Oshun, the film shows the multiplicity of the Black sacred feminine. She is also co-director for a short film called, Full Set: Portrait of an Artist (2026) that highlights internationally renowned nail artist, Kro Vargas, while also focusing on the aestheticized labor of Black and Latina women. She is also producing a docuseries called Conjure that explores the traditions of African American Hoodoo in the United States. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.