Sandra Vivas

My name is Sandra Vivas, born in Venezuela and based in Dominica since 2009. I have a Bachelor in Arts from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, USA. My background as an artist is in performance and video and I have a long career in this area, working on questioning cliches about gender roles, identity, and the structure of power in relationships. In 2014 I started to experiment in documentary film and I am currently working on animation films, documenting my experience during and after Cat 5 Hurricane Maria in Dominica. In 2017 my life was seriously affected by the passing of Hurricane Maria, totally shifting the focus of my work and prompting me to start documenting my story through drawing and collage, the cheapest means I had available and using my phone as a camera to do my first stop motion experiments. I decided to call this film “Another Hurricane Story” since it is one among so many, a shared fear by those who live in areas prone to Hurricanes such as the Caribbean. My relationship with climate change became personal, urgent and absolutely unavoidable.