Luisela Alvaray is an associate professor in our Media and Cinema Studies concentration. As a Fulbright and an OAS scholar, she attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she completed her master’s and doctoral degrees in Critical Studies in Film and Television. She specializes in Latin American cinema, transnational cinemas, cultural studies and documentary studies. Other subjects she explores through her teaching and research are film history and globalization and media.
Alvaray has served in multiple committees at the college and university levels. For three years, she led the college to a successful Academic Program Review. She is invested in the internationalization of the communication curriculum, for which she was chair of the team that developed an international communication minor, and has been a member and co-chair of the college’s Internationalization Committee. She also co-taught a study abroad to Mexico City in 2010 and 2011, and a study abroad to Spain every year since 2015 to the present. The latter is a summer program called
Study Abroad Spain: Cinema and the City. Alvaray has also developed a
Global Learning Experience course with Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain.
Alvaray is active in two professional organizations—the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), where she was Secretary and Co-chair of the Latino/a Caucus between 2013-2016, and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), where she is an active member of the Film Studies section.
Through her coursework and professional endeavors, Alvaray tries to keep an active connection with the community. She periodically asks students to attend different film festivals in the city, brings filmmakers from the community to her classes, and has personally served twice as judge in the documentary competitions of the Chicago International Film Festival.
Alvaray’s research has been published in Cinema Journal, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Cultural Dynamics, Communication Teacher, Transnational Cinemas, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Film & History, Emergences, Objeto Visual (Caracas), Cinemais (Rio de Janeiro), and Film-Historia (Barcelona). She is also a contributor to Global Cinema Networks (2018), The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinemas (2017), Latin American Melodrama (2009), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World (2008) and has published two books in Spanish — A la luz del proyector: Itinerario de una espectadora (2002) and Las versiones fílmicas: los discursos que se miran (1994).
Alvaray is originally from Caracas, Venezuela, speaks Spanish at home and has a beautiful, smart and imaginative daughter, who she considers her best creation.