Tania Hernández Velasco is a filmmaker born and based in México City. They are a descendant of displaced and De-Indigenized peasants. Through a ludic and sensory approach, their work explores junctions between body, territory, and identity that traverse their intimate sphere in the center of so-called México. Intertwining documentary, fiction, and experimental strategies, their cinema seeks to accompany and nurture expansive bonds of kinship between land, humans and more-than-human beings.
Titixe (2018), their first feature documentary, has been selected in more than 50 international film festivals and collected several more than 10 prizes and mentions including those from FICUNAM, Full Frame, Málaga, Black Canvas, Doqumenta. In 2019, they were selected as a Flaherty Seminar – Professional Development Fellow (NY) and were awarded the Charles C. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award (Full Frame FF, NC).
In 2022, they debuted as an opera stage director for Opera Lafayette’s Silvain, which premiered in NYC’s Museo del Barrio and the Kennedy Center. That year, they also premiered the short film Eclipsis, commissioned by Mexico’s National University Cinematheque. This film has been awarded Ann Arbor's Best Experimental Film and Black Canvas' Best Director. In 2024, Hernández Velasco received México's Jóvenes Creadores Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship with their upcoming film Macpalxochitl (hand-flower-tree) (2026).
They are currently post-producing their second feature film Our Body Is an Expanding Star, co-directed with Semillites Hernández Velasco. They have received México’s Jóvenes Creadores grant, as well as the financial support of FOCINE-IMCINE and Firelight Media William Greaves Development Fund for their films.
At MacDowell they developed their upcoming film, a hybrid docu-fiction that entangles four different times in the same lineage of trees, as well as a handful of their inhabitants: spirits, peasants, spiders, land defenders and seeds.
