Patricia Riggen

​Artistic Survival: Between Gender Discrimination and Technological Transformation

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Patricia Riggen will examine the structural constraints that women continue to face within the U.S. film industry, where gender-based discrimination and cultural prejudices persistently restrict their access to positions of authority. Her testimony underscores how women’s professional legitimacy remains subject to ongoing scrutiny, requiring quantifiable evidence of competence in order to be recognized. Beyond her individual trajectory, Riggen offers a critical reflection on Hollywood’s current technological transformation, characterized by the accelerating adoption of algorithmic automation. She cautions that this process – although financially advantageous for industry stakeholders – undermines the artistic and humanistic dimensions of cinema, diminishing its capacity to produce meaning and to generate significance within the lived cultural experience of contemporary audiences.

 

Patricia Riggen is a Mexican filmmaker born in Guadalajara and earned a master's degree in directing from Columbia University, New York. Her first short film, La Milpa, received 20 international awards, including the Student Academy Award and the Ariel. Her documentary Family Portrait won the Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. After five feature films, she is considered one of the most prolific film directors in the United States. In July 2020, an Annenberg Foundation study named Patricia Riggen the only Latina female director to have directed one of the 1,200 highest-grossing films of the last decade in the United States.