Krystal Ledesma

Krystal Ledesma’s research areas include Classic Hollywood and Mexican-American/Chicana/o images in film. She’s interested in the relationship between 1940s Mexican-American/Chicana/o activism, the Hollywood Left and the representation of Mexican-American/Chicana/os on-screen. Her paper “Los Sueños Locos of Mi Vida Loca: Dreaming Alternative Chicana Narratives through Narration and Agency” was accepted into the Society of Cinema and Media Studies 2021 conference. In 2019 she served as a Cultural Equity and Inclusion Project intern at the Academy Film Archive. As an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, she won the Arts Dean’s Undergraduate Award, Chancellor’s Undergraduate Award, and Academic Excellence Award for her senior thesis, and in 2015 helped to archive the “Lost City of DeMille” exhibition at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Guadalupe, Calif.

Research Interests

Classic Hollywood history, race and ethnicity in Hollywood, Mexican-American/Chicana/o images in U.S. media, archival research, genre studies

Education

B.A., Film and Digital Media, Critical Studies concentration, UC Santa Cruz, 2015
M.A., Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, 2017