Cecilia Aldarondo is a director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016) and Landfall (2020) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the award-winning PBS series POV. Her third feature, You Were My First Boyfriend, had its world premiere at the 2023 South by Southwest Film Festival and is now streaming on HBO.
Among Aldarondo's fellowships and honors are the 2024 Borderlands Visionary Fellowship, the IDA Emerging Filmmaker Award, the New America Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellowship, and a 2019 Bogliasco Foundation Residency. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC's 40 Under 40 list and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2015. She teaches at Williams College.
At MacDowell in 2014, Aldarondo co-edited Memories of a Penitent Heart along with her collaborator Hannah Buck. In 2014 the film was awarded a grant from The Sundance Institute, and Cecilia was selected as a 2015 Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow as well as the 2015 Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellow for Documentary. During her 2018 residency, she conducted research for and wrote Treasure Island and You Were My First Boyfriend. In 2024, she worked on a screenplay for her first narrative feature.
