April 17, 2025 12:30 PM - April 17, 2025 2:00 PM
Ortega Hall Reading Room (335)

Join us for a talk with Cuban anthropologist and filmmaker Aida Bueno Sarduy, whose work centers on
women’s leadership in African and Afro-descendants’ religions in Cuba and Brazil from the perspective
of gender and feminist theory and criticism.

Aida Esther Bueno Sarduy's research and documentary work has focused on women’s leadership in
African and Afro-descendents’ religions in Cuba and Brazil. She is researching letters of freedom and
freedom-purchasing documents of African or Afro-descendant women in Brazil in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Dr. Bueno Sarduy has a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Complutense
University of Madrid and has completed advanced studies on race relations and black culture at the
Center for Afro-Asian Studies at the Universidade Candido Mendes in Río de Janeiro.

Aida Esther Bueno Sarduy is also the founder of Ibirí filmes, an Afro-centric audiovisual
production company based in Spain that produces works by black women filmmakers, and
of Afro Diasporic Room, a consultancy for Afro-Latam artistic projects. Among her
documentary works are Guillermina, a short film about black wet-nurses in Cuba; Joaquina
de Angola, an audiovisual installation about a young enslaved woman in Brazil and her
escape to freedom; Anna Borges do Sacramento, a feature-length documentary about an
afro-descendant Brazilian enslaved woman who brought a civil action against her first
owner to maintain her “free” status; and Rezadeira (Praying for Others), a story of the
black mysticism and the syncretic beliefs of Catholicism.