Sheila Quintana Aguilar
Sheila Quintana Aguilar is a multi-modal artist, mother, and communications and language justice consultant. She works with non-profit and social movement organizations and small businesses to develop participatory, intersectional narrative and communication strategy for social change. She was a founding member and a former worker-owner at Bonfire Media Collective.
For nearly a decade, Sheila was a community and political organizer on local, state, and national campaigns at the intersection of migration, criminalization, and health. She led dozens of anti-deportation workshops and campaigns across the state, and co-led the campaign to introduce the first ever Congressional bill to stop the deportation of a Pennsylvania immigrant family.
She is a VONA writers workshop alum and was awarded the Center for Cultural Power’s Artist Leadership Award. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and is a candidate for a Certificate in Novel Writing by the Creative Writing Program at the Stanford School of Continuing Studies. Her film work has been supported by the Juneteenth Birth Worker Fund and the Trail Running Film Festival.
Sheila is originally from Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico. She has lived in the U.S. as an undocumented indigenous person for nearly twenty years.
Awarded Grants
2021
Media Artist + Activist Residency (MAR)
Overview
Sheila Quintana Aguilar in collaboration with the Movement of Immigrant Leaders in Pennsylvania (MILPA), will develop a short documentary on MILPA as it nears its ten year anniversary, supported and informed by a crew MILPA members. Footage filmed in the process will also be used to produce brief social media videos to support and amplify MILA's organizing campaigns and actions as needed throughout the year. With compounding crises around racism, the economy, climate change, health, and more, MILPA, led by undocumented and working class people organizing for human rights and economic justice for all, has a deep understanding of the root causes of the symptoms we experience as daily injustice - and this media work seeks to capture that leadership.