Sylvia Morales

Sylvia Morales (born 1943 in Phoenix, Arizona) is an American film director, writer, producer, and editor.

Morales is recognized as one of the first female Mexican-American filmmakers to have established a Latino cinema.

In her filmmaking career, Morales has been nationally recognized winning awards for film and video documentary on topics ranging from the farm workers struggle to the music of Los Lobos.

While the majority of her work is in the documentary film genre, she has also done work for the mass media television.

She has also published essays and photographs on Latina and feminist issues.

Sylvia Morales has lectured and taught in different Universities throughout Southern California.

Morales' work is characterized by strong documentaries that portray the Latino community.

She also has work that covers feminist issues in the Chicano community.

Morales was born in Phoenix but raised in Southern California, United States.

Emerging out of the late-1960s and 1970s political milieu, Sylvia Morales along with other early Latino activist filmmakers which include Moctesuma Esparza, Jesus Salvador Treviño, Susan Racho, and Luis Valdez became involved with civil rights activism.

Some were also among the first Latinos to be able to enter film schools and receive formal training.

According to Origins of Chicano and Latino Cinema, activists were fighting for a more positive representation of Latinos in mass media.

In the 1970s, the Chicana Feminist Movement was founded to address the specific needs of Chicanas as women of color in the United States.

Sylvia Morales was one of the Chicana artists who began to write and produce works in which Chicanas were given a proper name, voice, and image.

As mentioned by Jenny Dean, Chicanisma is a concept that gives a sense of sisterhood in feminist discourse.

Chicanisma emerged to confront the triple oppression of race, class, and gender within the Latino community.

The book, Latina Filmmakers and Writers examine the works of seven celebrated Latinas who collectively represent a 20-year history of Chicanisma and one of those listed in the book is Sylvia Morales.

Sylvia Morales first became active in film and television around 1971 when she started working for Channel 7 ABC, Los Angeles in a program called Unidos which was about the Chicano community in Los Angeles.

Jose Luis Ruiz who was the producer of the program was in need of a new camera operator since the guy who he had hired for the job decided to quit on him the night before the shoot.

Jose contacts Morales and giving her this opportunity to be a part of the tech crew since they had been at UCLA together for film in which he became aware of Morales' camera work.

She decided to accept the offer becoming the camera person for the program.

During her time at ABC she did thirteen half-hour documentaries that were aired to the public thereafter she began her career as a producer, director, author and editor.

Sylvia Morales has directed, written, produced and edited award winning and nationally recognized film and video work for the last 30 years in which she moved from the margins to mainstream media.

Morales studied at the University of California, Los Angeles where she received her Bachelor of Arts in 1972.

She then went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts in 1979 in film with an emphasis in motion picture production.

Morales first emerged with Chicana (1979), a film that traces the history of the Mexican indigenous woman from pre-Columbian time to the present.

This film established Morales as one of the first Chicana filmmakers in the nation.

This film highlighted and celebrated the Mexican-American culture and identity.

Sylvia Morales also worked for PBS, in which she was the Latino Consortium at KCET in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1985.

She was in charge of the production, programming and distribution of the programs that aired on PBS.

During her time at PBS, Morales hosted the Latino Consortium's weekly national series, Presente.

Along with that, Morales was one of the writing and producing teams for the award-winning series ''Chicano!

Other films that Morales has done are Love and Long Distance (1985), Hearts on Fire (1987), SIDA Is AIDS (1989), Real Men and Other Miracles (1999) and her latest production A Crushing Love (2009).

Her most important work according to Osa Hidaldo de la Riva would be in broadcasting television since the media allows Morales to reach a much larger audience.

Sylvia Morales' works for television include working for Showtime, PBS and Turner Broadcasting.

When she worked for Showtime, Morales directed episodes from the three seasons of Showtime's series Resurrection Blvd, which allowed her to work with actors Elizabeth Peña, Lou Gossett Jr, Michael De Lorenzo and Esai Morales.

She also worked on the Showtime series Women: Stories of Passion.

She worked on erotic fiction for Showtime's Women: Stories of Passion: La Limpia (The Cleansing, 1996) (in which she worked with María Conchita Alonso) and Angel From the Sky (1997).

The Mexican Civil Rights Movement for PBS, in which She produced Struggle in the Fields'' (1996), a 60-minute documentary that was part of the four-hour series.

She also wrote and produced the half-hour documentary Tell me again...What is Love? (1998) which talks about teen-dating violence.