Cecilia Barriga (Concepción, Chile, 1957) is a director, screenwriter, and audiovisual producer. Fleeing the dictatorship, she left her country at the age of nineteen to study in Madrid. In 1985, she graduated with a degree in image and sound from the Complutense University. She later continued her training in other countries: in 1994, she took a course in documentary filmmaking at the International Film and Television School in Havana; between 1995 and 1996, she moved to New York to study screenwriting and video creation at Columbia University. Upon her return to Spain, she has made numerous documentaries and television reports, without abandoning the field of fiction.
Her work explores feminism, social struggles with Chile as a reference point, the evolution of violence against women, immigrants, and LGTBI+ groups. She has also closely followed the process of citizen movements such as 15M in Spain, Occupy Wall Street in the US, and student protests in Chile. Fascinated by the original material in audiovisual archives and by small-format capture as a language, her gaze captures both the intimate and solitary space of an individual and the spontaneous performativity of crowds. She uses various formats, such as video creation, non-fiction cinema, documentary, performance, etc.
Her works have been exhibited internationally in contemporary art museums, television channels, festivals, and movie theaters. Among them are: MOMA (New York), Nikolaj Art Gallery (Copenhagen), Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (Seville), Sala Rekalde (Bilbao), Bildmuseet Úmea University (Sweden), Reina Sofía Art Museum (Madrid), MUSAC (León), Koldo Mitxelena Culturenea (San Sebastián), Van Abbeuseum (Eindhoven), Museo Nacional del Romanticismo, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago de Chile, among others.
Cecilia Barriga and Claudia Lorenz have been working together since 2006, producing two short films, Im Fluss and El día del euro (2007). They have also collaborated with the Ayllu collective on the diptych EYÉ and ONILÉ (2025).
