Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker. He was born in 1973 to a native of Peru and a native of New Jersey. Growing up in a bi-cultural channel surfing tract home led him to rethink some assumptions about race, immigration, identity, and the global economy. Over the past ten years he’s been making work that illuminates two massive and parallel realities: the globalization of information through the internet, and the globalization of families, and communities, through mass migration.
Rivera’s work uses many different techniques to try to describe these realities. He began his career working in the form of political satire and ‘fake documentary,’ but over time, his work fractured, and now also includes work in narrative and traditional documentary. Even though he has not been faithful to one particular form or another, Rivera’s work always skews towards discussing the surreal elements of political realities, and it always strives to be both accessible and critical. Alex Rivera’s work demonstrates that complex arguments can be made clear and simple through the audio/visual medium.
In his most recent film, Sleep Dealer (USA/Mexico, to be completed in 2007) Rivera synthesizes these explorations into a ground-breaking science-fiction feature film set on the U.S./Mexico border. Sleep Dealer takes many of the premises he explored in his previous films Why Cybraceros? and The Sixth Section, and combines them in a personal, emotional, and surreal narrative that follows a migrant worker in the near future.
The distribution of Alex Rivera’s work has taken him through a set of wildly varied venues, through communities as diverse and divergent as the Saturday afternoon crowd at the Guggenheim and the Migrant Ministers of Tampa, Florida. Since he builds his films and videos from inspirations such as immigration and the internet, he ensure that the works open themselves up to new audiences, audiences that defy history and expectation.
Alex Rivera won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film award at The Sundance Film Festival in 2008 for Sleep Dealer and the Sloan Comissioning Grant at The Sundance institute in 2009 for La Vida Robot