Chon Noriega

About Chon

• Director of Chicano Studies, Professor
• Office: 3329 Macgowan
• E-mail:
• Phone: 310-206-0714

Biography

A Professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, and Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Chon Noriega is author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minnesota, 2000) and editor of nine books dealing with Latino media, performance and visual art. He has produced two documentaries, most recently “Casa Libre/Freedom House” (2008), about a homeless shelter for undocumented, unaccompanied minors.

For the past decade, Noriega has been active in media policy and professional development, for which Hispanic Business named him as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Hispanics. He is co-founder of the 400-member National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP, established in 1999) and served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the largest source of independent project funding within public television.

In addition to his work in media, Noriega has curated numerous arts projects, including the current traveling exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement. He has also helped recover and preserve independent films and video art, including the first three Chicano-directed feature films. The restoration of these films is the cornerstone of an ongoing Chicano Cinema Recovery Project that he organized between the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Chicano Studies Research Center, with major support from the Ford, Rockefeller and Ahmanson Foundations. His awards include the Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art (for art history) and the Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship (for documentary production).