BIOGRAPHY.
FANA ADJANI (Mexico City, 1988) is an artist, film director, and choreographer. Her practice explores the body, cinema, and choreography as an expansive and experimental dispositif that articulates living relations between memory, human rights, and the politics of care, working across the visual arts, the performing arts, and at times their intersections with the mainstream.
She directed the short film TIERRA, selected at festivals such as the Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival in Calgary (where it received the Programmer’s Choice Award for Best Short Film), the Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF), MICGénero, the Seattle Queer Film Festival, and the Outfest Fusion QTBIPOC Film Festival in Los Angeles. In 2023, TIERRA was incorporated into the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Film & Television Archive and had a special screening at GAVLAK Gallery. About the film, Rolling Stone (U.S.) wrote: “Wonderfully directed.”
As a visual artist, she has presented her work at venues such as the Museo Universitario del Chopo (UNAM), where she coordinated the TIERRA Cycle and presented the installation Se encuentran, se acompañan, as well as at MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM) and the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Her audiovisual piece Whole Body has been screened at The Overkill Festival (Netherlands), in Bogotá, and was presented exclusively by ForbesLife.
In 2023, she was an artist-in-residence at Fundación Casa Wabi.
Between 2023 and 2024, she collaborated as an advisor to the Youth Council for Cultural Outreach at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
WORKING METHOD.
FANA ADJANI explores cinema, image, and choreography as an expansive and experimental dispositif that articulates and traverses living relations among bodies, memory, human rights, and the politics of care, understood as sensitive fields where the intimate and the collective mutually affect one another. She works across the visual arts, the performing arts, and at times their intersections with the mainstream, creating a space to tension and reconfigure the ways we see and feel in common.
PRESS.
“...directed with extraordinary beauty in Tierra...”
— Julyssa Lopez, Rolling Stone (U.S.)
“Adjani has already directed music videos and, with Tierra, makes the leap to a larger-scale production (...).”
— José Juan de Ávila, Milenio
“The project (...) will continue to reap success for Fana Adjani’s avant-garde cinematic and choreographic vision.”
— Armando Tovar, Naufraghost
“Tierra, directed by the renowned Mexican multidisciplinary artist Fana Adjani, is a film that acknowledges the constant destruction of our planet and of the body as that home in transformation.”
— Bianka Estrada, Sin Embargo
“The most prominent Mexican stage director (...) in recent times.”
— Sheila Ramírez, Forbes
“She has managed to transcend the barriers or limitations that usually exist in the industry, giving voice to a social movement that powerfully draws attention.”
— Danieska Espinosa, Crónica
“Subunguis (a piece by Fana) is a recommendable stage experience that seduces with its visual proposals and an urban soundscape, and leaves us with space to reflect on the times we are living through and on the difficulty of escaping them.” — Wenceslao Bruciaga, Time Out.
