Joie Estrella Horwitz is a writer and director based in New York City, originally from the Southwest borderlands region. Her work explores the growing militarization and xenophobic discourses in the border landscape and their impact on its inhabitants. Her filmmaking combines research-based fieldwork with fiction storytelling, delving into the space between fact and fiction at the intersection of physical and psychological borders.

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 DOK Leipzig, Brooklyn Film Festival, UnionDocs, Le Cinéma Club, REDCAT, Images Festival, Visions du Reel, ICDOCS, 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 Sundance Institute’s Creative Producing Lab, Women at Sundance Adobe Fellowship, 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 with Pastel on her first feature film, Dreamland.