Scholarship and Biography
Patricia is an anthropologist and filmmaker whose scholarly research and creative practice develops in the folds between ethnography, critical theory, sensory ethnography, and the documentary arts. Her most recent publications explore issues on ethnography and filmmaking, multimodal ethnography, and experimental ethnographic methods. She is currently working on her book manuscript Moral Fibers: Making Fashion Ethical. The book critically explores the Peruvian alpaca wool supply chain analyzing how, through the intervention of development projects, indigenous women artisans and their aesthetic traditions are interpolated into “ethical fashion” manufacturing networks. Moral Fibers unites the fields of political economy, ethnic studies, aesthetic theory, and gender studies to expand our thinking about the parameters and exclusions encoded into “ethical capitalism.”
Her latest film Entretejido weaves together the different sites and communities involved in this supply chain, bringing viewers into contact with the ways objects we wear are entangled in national racial politics and histories. The film, which premiered at the Havana International Film Festival, extends her long-standing critical engagement with aesthetic politics, sensorial and embodied forms of knowledge.
She is the producer, additional camera and sound, for the feature observational documentary film, Backside, which follows the life and labor of the under recognized BIPOC grooms who care for the thoroughbred horses that compete in the Kentucky Derby. Backside has received support from ITVS DDF, ITVS Open Call, Latino Public Broadcasting, PBS/Firelight William Greaves Production Fund, LEF Foundation, Catapult Film Fund, Princess Grace, and Creative Capital is currently in post-production.
She is starting to work on an ethnography and film of the color magenta exploring its symbolic, cultural, racial, gendered, political and industrial life.