February 2009
 Documentary producer and director Alexandra Halkin is the founder and international coordinator for the Chiapas Media Project/Promedios de Comunicación Comunitaria (CMP), a bi-national non-profit organization that has provided video and computer equipment and training to indigenous communities in the impoverished southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Guerrero. In 2009 CMP launched Fair Food Across Borders, a bi-national advocacy project using video to campaign against human rights abuses faced by migrant farm workers, often from Chiapas and Guerrero, who harvest many of the fruits and vegetables grown in Mexico by transnational corporations and consumed in the United States and Canada. Halkin has worked as facilitator and trainer for the indigenous media makers working with CMP, and as a prolific producer and director herself. She has won many prestigious fellowships and grants, including a Fulbright Award for U.S. Scholars in 2007 for Media Studies in Mexico and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2004. Halkin, who resides in Chicago, received a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois in 1985.
'”We always believed independent media can contribute to creating progressive social change, most of my work has been about that in the 20th century and now in the 21st century.”
Screened by NMAI
Image credit: Alex Halkin - courtesy of the filmmaker
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