Alex Rivera

Alex Rivera is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology. 

Rivera’s first feature film, Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk thriller set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and had a commercial theatrical release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries.  

Rivera’s second feature, The Infiltrators, won the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The Infiltrators uses documentary and scripted forms to tell the true story of Dreamers who ‘infiltrate’ a detention center to get immigrants out.  

Rivera is currently developing a few new cyberpunk projects and, with support from the Ford Foundation, a feature documentary on the history of deportation titled Banishment. 

Alex Rivera is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Hampshire College and lives in Los Angeles. He is an Associate Professor of Filmmaking Practice at ASU's Sidney Poitier New American Film School.