Casas Broda, Ana

Born in Granada, Spain, in 1965, she moved with her mother to Mexico City in 1974. She studied photography, painting, and history, dedicating herself to photography since 1983. Between 1989 and 1993, she lived in Vienna and Madrid. She returned to Mexico in 1993, and until her grandmother's death in 2002, she spent long periods caring for her in Vienna. She worked for 14 years on the Álbum project, first in the series of images with her grandmother and later in the development of the book and exhibition, including texts, diaries, images of her ancestors, her grandmother, audios, videos, etc. In 2000, the Spanish publisher Mestizo published the book Álbum, which was later presented as an exhibition in Mexico and Spain. Since 1991, she has held solo exhibitions in Spain, Austria, Germany, and Mexico, as well as group exhibitions in various countries. She has received several awards and grants in Mexico and Austria. From 2008 to 2011, she was a recipient of the National System of Art Creators of FONCA for the development of her Kinderwunsch project. In addition to her artistic work, since 1990, she has been dedicated to organizing photography-related activities, such as study programs, seminars, workshops, meetings, conferences, etc. In 1994, she founded the workshop area of the Centro de la Imagen, which she coordinated until 2008, building a program with over three hundred workshops per year for all levels of learning, from introductory to specialized seminars in various fields. From 2002 to 2006, she was the coordinator of FotoGuanajuato, an initiative of the Instituto de Cultura de Guanajuato and the Centro de la Imagen, which included the annual realization of a photography study program, the Comprehensive Program, and every two years the FotoGuanajuato encounter, which included roundtable discussions, exhibitions, portfolio reviews, workshops, among other activities. Since 2007, she has worked as coordinator and tutor of the Contemporary Photography Seminar at the Centro de la Imagen, in collaboration with other advisors such as Gerardo Montiel Klint, Agustín Estrada, Beatriz Novaro, among others. Currently, the seminar is held in collaboration with the Centro de las Artes de Oaxaca. She worked on the Kinderwunsch project from 2006 to 2013. In 2013, Kinderwunsch was published as a book, in which images and texts construct a narrative, by the publishing house La Fábrica in co-edition with Fundación Televisa, Programa de Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales, FONCA, Bundesministerium für Unterricht und Kunst of Austria, and Hydra, Mexico. The book was published in Spanish, English, and German. In May 2014, the Kinderwunsch book received the second prize for the best edited book of 2013 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports in Spain. In 2012, she founded the Hydra project with Gabriela González Reyes and Gerardo Montiel Klint, a platform to generate projects related to the medium of photography.