Ela Troyano

American independent filmmaker and cross-disciplinary artist from Cuba (b. October 1949); lives and works in New York City. Ela Troyano is best known for a series of "live cinema" multimedia performances, presented over the years at prestigious New York venues such as The Public Theater, Guggenheim Museum, Performance Space 122 and Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She co-founded the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984 with Tessa Hughes-Freeland. Troyano earned grants from The New York State Council On The Arts, The Jerome Foundation and other organizations. In 2012, Arsenal, Berlin presented a Career Retrospective exhibition of her work. Ela Troyano settled in New York City in the early 1980s, regularly working with her sister, Alina Troyano (b. 1951), or "Carmelita Tropicana." She attended writing workshops with Maria Irene Fornes at INTAR Theatre and legendary Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1927—2014) at Sundance. Soon after she established in NYC, Troyano began extensively collaborating with experimental filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland and free jazz musician and producer John Zorn. Some of their notable productions include Playboy Voodoo (1992) short (a compilation of the duo's early 1986–90 works with Zorn's music), Elegy for Jean Genet (1994) live cinema performance, dedicated to controversial French writer Jean Genet (1910—1986) and based on John Zorn's "." It premiered at The Knitting Factory in Manhattan, and later Troyano and Hughes-Freeland performed Elegy across Europe as part of Zorn's Tzadik '97 label tour. In 2001, the duo performed an "expanded cinema" multi-projection improvisation Godard, produced by Jim Staley and centered around Jean-Luc Godard's classic 1963 film Contempt and Zorn's eponymous composition. In 1997, Ela Troyano produced her debut feature-length movie, Latin Boys Go to Hell, a "coming-of-age" gay love story dressed like a Mexican soap opera. The film featured an all-percussion score composed by John Zorn, which was subsequently released on 1094689 CD. In 2007, Troyano wrote, produced and directed a one-hour PBS documentary, "La Lupe: Queen of Latin Soul."