Breixo Viejo

Breixo Viejo is full-time term Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University of New York, since 2018. His main research focuses on the history of experimental and independent film, diasporic cinemas, as well as alternative modes of film production in Europe and the Americas. He holds an MA degree in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research, New York, and a PhD in Film History (Summa Cum Laude) at the Universidad Autónoma, Madrid. From 2014 to 2018, he was a Senior Research Associate in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College, London; before that, he was a visiting scholar at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Freie Universität zu Berlin, Columbia University in New York, and Casa Buñuel in Mexico City. He has received awards from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the UK Arts Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Academia de Cine.

Viejo is the author of the books Música moderna para un nuevo cine: Eisler, Adorno y el Film Music Project (Madrid: Akal, 2008), an in-depth analysis of the intersection of critical theory and film, and Film Books (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2016), a visual history of cinema literature from 1895 to present day. He has co-edited with Jo Evans Luis Buñuel: Correspondencia escogida (Madrid: Cátedra, 2018), which was awarded Best Book of the Year by the Spanish Academy of Motion Pictures, and translated as Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). This English edition has been praised as "an impressive collection" (Film Comment), "an overdue blessing" (Sight & Sound), "an unexpected revelation," as Michel Ciment called it, "a colossal work" (Positif). 

Viejo has extensively written on independent and avant-garde cinema and the film work of directors such as Joris Ivens, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Samuel Beckett, Alain Resnais, and Jim Jarmusch. His book chapters have been translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and his articles and reviews have been published in international journals - including The Times Literary Supplement, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Archivos de la Filmoteca. He has presented lectures and participated in talks at Yale University, the School of Visual Arts, New York University, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (Durham), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico UNAM (Mexico City), CRAC (Valparaíso), Arts Santa Mónica (Barcelona), DEFA Stiftung (Berlin), and Hochschule der Künste (Bern).  

He is now working on the first critical biography of the exiled Catalan-Cuban cineaste Néstor Almendros, for which he has received two Barnard College Research Grants. As part of this project, he has recently published the article "Crítico, comisario y cineasta experimental: Néstor Almendros en Nueva York, 1957-1959" (Secuencias 53, Spring 2021) and presented the lecture "Cine-verdad, Afrocubanism, and Political Dissidence: Almendros in Havana, 1959-1962" at the New Direction in Cuban Studies conference (Harvard University/University of Miami, October 2021).