UIC Filmmaker Receives Illinois Distinguished Artist Award

Silvia Malagrino, a filmmaker and professor of art and design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has received an Illinois Secretary of State Distinguished Artist Award for outstanding contributions to cultural and community leadership.

Malagrino will be honored at a celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month at the James R. Thompson Center on September 28 at noon.

Malagrino works in film, digital video, photography and installation. She describes her work as “amalgamating critical thinking with poetry, and metaphor with documentation.”

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her film work in 2010. She used the fellowship as art director on “Singing in the Dark,” with filmmaker and editor Sharon Karp. The film traces the flight of Karp’s parents from the Nazis between 1938 and 1943, from Austria to France, Spain, and finally America, where they raised their family.

“I think my narratives are more along the lines of cinema, with visual and verbal layers,” Malagrino said.

Malagrino received wide acclaim and a CINE Golden Eagle Award in 2005 for her first film, “Burnt Oranges,” a 90-minute documentary on the 1976-1983 dictatorship that led Malagrino to leave her native Argentina. She interviewed torture survivors, families of “the disappeared,” journalists, and high-ranking officers of the junta responsible for the crackdown.

Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, La Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Fundaçao Athos Bulçao in Brasilia.

Malagrino has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, seven fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, and a fellowship from Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago.