Joie Estrella Horwitz is an artist from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of the Southwest. Her practice is shaped by the landscape she comes from, having grown up in a desert where histories, crossings, and lives often go unseen. For this reason, the spectral lives in her work as both metaphor and method, a way of approaching what is present but not always visible. She is drawn to where ghosts reside: in landscapes, in the body, and in collective memory. She treats fiction as a space to engage the unseen, bringing research and imagination into dialogue.

After completing her MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts, Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. Her work has screened Images Festival, DOK Leipzig, Brooklyn Film Festival, UnionDocs, Le Cinéma Club, REDCAT, Visions du Reel, ICDOCS, Rooftop Films, Flaherty Seminar, Tacoma Film Festival, among others. Her most recent film, A Summer Job, won Best Fiction Short at the New Orleans Film Festival.

She has been awarded fellowships to the Women at Sundance Adobe Fellowship, Sundance Institute’s Creative Producing Lab, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and the Logan Nonfiction program. Her projects have been awarded grants from the SFFILM Rainin Screenwriting Grant, Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund, Princess Grace Foundation Award, Alison Doerner Fund for Women Pioneers in Filmmaking, and the Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in the Storytelling Arts.

Currently, she is collaborating on two feature projects: Dreamland, produced by PASTEL, and When the Sun Warms produced by Tender.