Raquel Cepeda

Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, award-winning filmmaker and writer Raquel Cepeda is the author of "Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina." "Bird of Paradise" is equal parts memoir about Cepeda’s coming of age in New York City and Santo Domingo, and detective story chronicling her year-long journey to discover the truth about her ancestry. The book also looks at what it means to be a hyphenated American-Latina today.

Her latest film, the award-winning LA MADRINA: THE SAVAGE OF LORINE PADILLA, is currently available for streaming on Showtime. Directed, written, and produced by Cepeda, the documentary follows a beloved South Bronx matriarch and former “First Lady” of the Savage Skulls gang as she struggles to remain visible in a rapidly gentrifying community she helped rebuild in the 1980s. With one foot firmly grounded in the outlaw life and the other as an activist and spiritual advisor, Lorine straddles the complexities of multiple worlds. Employing rich never-before-seen archives of the borough that gifted the world both salsa and hip-hop culture, we will go on a complicated and, at times, surreal journey through five decades of Bronx history and resilience in LA MADRINA’s own words. Henry Chalfant and Sacha Jenkins are the film’s executive producers.

Cepeda’s documentary film, Some Girls, produced by Henry Chalfant and Sam Pollard, focuses on a group of troubled Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, the white supremacist narratives about American history they’ve been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. What does it really mean to be American? And, more importantly, what does that look like? The Some Girls companion curricula for 6-8th grade, High School, and Undergraduate students is available for free download here.

Cepeda directed and produced the award-nominated Bling: A Planet Rock, a documentary about American hip-hop culture’s obsession with diamonds and all of its social trappings, and how the infatuation with “blinging” became intertwined in Sierra Leone’s decade-long conflict. The film was co-produced by VH1/MTV Networks and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The film had a limited theatrical release and aired in 2007 on VH1.

Cepeda co-created the podcast "Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race." For more than two decades, her writings have been widely anthologized and her byline has been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Village Voice, GQ, and many others. A former magazine editor, Cepeda edited the anthology "And It Don’t Stop: The Best Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years." In November 2014, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Cepeda was presented with an award from celebrated Dominican artist German Perez at the United Nations.

A proud dominiyorker, women’s boxing enthusiast and amateur fighter, Cepeda is a two-time National Golden Gloves winner. She lives with her husband and producing partner, Sacha Jenkins, and their son, in New York City, the "concrete jungle where dreams are made of." Together, Jenkins and Cepeda are developing documentary, narrative, and commercial projects under their shingle, RESURGENT PICTURES.