The Team
Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo
Cecilia is a documentary filmmaker, artist and educator engaging rural communities in southern Minnesota in a multilayered exploration of home. Locally rooted yet globally minded, Cecilia’s work examines notions of belonging and the immigrant experience while exploring the traces of historical trauma on people and places. Her experience growing up under dictatorship in her native Chile led her to develop an artistic practice that encourages community members to reflect in order to envision and generate paths toward collective wellbeing.
Based in Northfield, Minnesota since 2010, Cecilia has produced two feature-length documentaries in close partnership with underrepresented groups in town, Making Noise ~ The Story of a Skatepark (2012-2016), developed with the local skateboarders, and Ways of Being Home (2016-2020) produced in collaboration with the Latinx community of Northfield. Her latest explorations, The Wandering House, The Embroidery Project and Sonic Landscapes of Rural Minnesota, have sparked collaborations with individuals and organizations inside and outside of Northfield and expanded her practice beyond filmmaking.
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An inaugural recipient of the 2020 McKnight Fellowship for Community-Engaged Artists, Cecilia’s work has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2016, 2018, 2020), the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (2019, https://www.nalac.org/members/7820-cecilia-m-cornejo/), the Mellon Grant Public Works Initiative, from Carleton College (2018, 2019, 2021), the Jerome Foundation (2016), and the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (2014). Her film work, currently distributed by Women Make Movies (https://www.wmm.com/filmmaker/Cecilia+Cornejo/), has shown at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, Cine las Americas (TX), Lonestar Film Festival (TX), as well as internationally at L’Alternativa (Spain), Arsenale (Germany), InVideo (Italy), Melbourne Latin American Film Festival (Australia), Puerto Vallarta International Film Festival (Mexico), Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (Chile), Festival de Cine Pobre (Cuba), and more.
Cecilia is an Artist Career Consultant with Springboard for the Arts and teaches filmmaking in Northfield, the occupied ancestral land of the Wahpekute Band of the Dakota Nation. For more information about her work, visit these links:
Interview/podcast with Lanesboro Arts
Cecilia Cornejo ~ McKnight Talk ~ In conversation with Mike Hoyt
Interview with Cathy Wurzer on MPR on documentary film Ways of Being Home ~ Between Northfield & Maltrata
Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo Centers Community ~ Moving Lives—Minnesota Stories of Origin and Immigration
Rochester Press on The Embroidery Project
Northfield News on The Wandering House
Ceile Kronick
A current Cinema and Media Studies major at Carleton College, and a lover of anything and everything related to sound, Ceile is incredibly excited for the chance to work on The Wandering House project. Having worked with other projects relating to music history and people’s music cultures and music identities, he is enjoying the chance to branch out and look deeper into people’s personal connections with place and conceptions of home.
Louisa Ballinger
Louisa is a 2021 graduate of Carleton College from the Cinema and Media Studies department. Over the summer of 2020, she worked closely with The Embroidery Project and was very excited to see the first exhibition of the Northfield Community Quilt go up her last term at Carleton in the spring. This year she will be living in Omaha, Nebraska, and working as a Weitz Fellow for Film Streams. Louisa is extremely excited to see how The Embroidery Project and The Wandering House projects continue to develop.
Cecilia Kryzda
A proud Northfield native, in 2020 Cecilia embarked on graduate school at the University of Iowa where she is pursuing Media Studies and her passion for sci-fi and audiovisual aesthetics. When she is not watching music videos, she is already thinking fondly of her next food experience. Cecilia worked on transcribing and translating from Spanish to English the oral testimonies collected by The Wandering House in 2019.
Apoorba Misra
Apoorba “Arya” Misra was born and raised in India, attended high school in Japan, then moved to the United States to start college. Feeling a close connection with the topic of home, Arya has been a steady presence throughout most phases of The Wandering House project. A Cinema and Media Studies major at Carleton College, she assisted with the recording of testimonies in 2019, helped build The Wandering House first website, transcribed portions of the audio collected, and much much more. Check out Arya’s work here: www.aryamisra.com
Sergio Demara
Sergio is a musician and actor based in Tucson, Arizona. A recent graduate from the Cinema and Media Studies Department at Carleton College (2020), Sergio is responsible for most of the photography work featured in The Wandering House website and, along with Arya, played an instrumental role in launching the project in the summer of 2019. Currently, Sergio works for Prescott College and is signed to Models Melange, a talent and modeling company.
Kelly West Figueroa-Ray
After teaching at St. Olaf College, Kelly recently accepted the position of University Chaplain / Director of the Wesley Center for Spirituality, Service and Social Justice, at Hamline University. Her academic focus is the relationship between scripture and theology as it is lived out in contemporary communities with a particular interest in multicultural Christian ministries.
Frank Meyer
Frank is a Northfield native and oral history enthusiast. A graduate of Kalamazoo College, he is currently pursuing a PhD in History from the University California, Davis. Along with his involvement in The Wandering House, Frank has recorded audio segments with KRSM radio for their Southside 60 programming. He is thankful to have participated in a project that explores his hometown of Northfield in such depth.
Rafael Estrella
Rafael Estrella is a Carleton College graduate, a full time K-12 licensed Art teacher with the Northfield Public Schools district as well as with the Northfield Arts Guild. He hopes to continue to teach Art to future generations of students while making his own artwork in ceramics.
Rafael Estrella, Frank Meyer, Sergio, Cecilia, Arya, and Kelly West Figueroa-Ray.