Rodrigo Dorfman

Rodrigo Dorfman is an award-winning artist, who has worked with ITVS, POV, HBO, PBS, Salma Hayek’s Ventanazul and the BBC among other. For over 25 years, Rodrigo Dorfman has been documenting the Great Latino Migration to the American South through a series of community centered hybrid films. His films have been screened around the world (Toronto, Full Frame, Edinburgh, Telluride, Human Rights Watch, Havana, SANFIC). 

His short One Night in Kernersville won the Jury Award for best short at Full Frame (2011). His 2018 documentary This Taco Truck Kills Fascists won the Best Louisiana Feature Award at the New Orleans Film Festival, and his documentary Bulls and Saints was  broadcast on POV (Sept, 2023) and toured in 2024 with the Southern Circuit of Independent Filmmakers. Dorfman is the recipient of the NEH/ITVS Documentary Development Fellowship (2022), the International Documentary Association Fellowship (2022) and the Firelight William Greaves Production Fund (2002). He is currently in post-production for The Dream of the Bear, the story of an undocumented Azteca dancer who returns home to Mexico to reclaim his families abandoned land.  

His multimedia work, including video, photography and paintings have been exhibited coast to coast.  at the Levine Museum of the New South, the Atlanta History Center, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the MAK in Los Angeles, SECCA in Winston Salem,  Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Duke University. In 2024, he premiered at Duke University, The Time Travelers of Durham and other Fabulations, his first solo exhibit, pioneering the docupainting techniques he has been developing for over a decade. He is currently sharing The Disobedient Ones. An exhibit with muralist Cornelio Campos is on view at the Frederic Jameson Gallery on Duke East Campus.  

Rodrigo Dorfman is also a playwright, film critic, essayist, multimedia journalist, and ethnographer, and an associate member of the performance group, la Pocha Nostra. He is the co-editor and publisher of Nuevo South Magazine. His memoir, Generation Exile, was published by Arte Público Press in May 2023. 

Artist Fee: $1,000-$2,500, plus travel (screening fee included)
Availability: August-November 2026; January-May 2027 (Note: I am normally unavailable in June and July due to residency requirements of the MFA program in which I teach.)

Contact 
Email Rodrigo Dorfman 
www.rodrigodorfman.com

Explore Artist's Work
Docupainting Portfolio