Projects
Página en Blanco (2015)
Narrative Short Film
Director
Página en Blanco (Blank Page) examines how personal identity becomes entangled with political history. By reimagining the last day in the life of Dominican journalist Orlando Martínez Howley through deliberately fragmented imagery, the short film mediates on the tensions between individual agency and the structures that supress it.
Prisioneros del Mar (2015)
Writer - Director - Producer
Award: UNICEF Journalism Award (2015)
This documentary investigates how social and economic constraints delimit the identities of marginalized youth. Operating at the intersection of documentary ethics, social advocacy, and digital media practice, the film draws on traditions of cinéma vérité and participatory modes to position the camera simultaneously as witness and collaborator. Prisioneros del mar extends my inquiry into how identity is formed when individuals are forced to navigate conditions of precarity, visibility, and public accountability.
Pose Momma, Pose (2019)
Writer - Director - Editor
MFA Thesis Film
Influenced by feminist film theory and representational ethics, Pose Momma, Pose examines how identity evolves across the lifespan and how cultural narratives around beauty shape that evolution. Through controlled mise-en-scéne, archival materials, and a muted color palette, the film interrogates the visual systems that privilege youth and consumption, revealing how older bodies negotiate visibility within media culture.
Issa Lot - Self-Design (2020-present)
Director - Creative Researcher - Editor - Performer
Issa Lot is a long-term investigation into digital self-design, where drag becomes an experimental interface for modeling how identity is constructed, processed, and re-authored across media systems. This video compiles the project's evolving visual iterations, treating the face and body as programmable surfaces that can be layered, blended, and reconfigured. Through editing pipelines, algorithmic curation, and platform-specific aesthetics, Issa Lot examines how networked environments shape the circulation of the self.
About me
I'm Erwin Villanueva, a Dominican filmmaker, digital media artist, and educator exploring human identity through film, drag, and digital media. A Fulbright Scholar with an MFA from SCAD, I teach film theory and film editing at PUCMM and create work that treats the self as something editable, something continually reimagined through performance and technology. I also collaborate as a video editor and content creator, blending cinematic craft with contemporary digital workflows.