Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz earned his BA in “History of the Americas” at the University of Puerto Rico, and his MA and PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Iowa. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at CU-Boulder. He is the author of the books West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece (University Press of Kansas, 2013), Pedro Almodóvar (British Film Institute 2007/2009), and Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (University of California Press, 2003). His works have also appeared in many journals and edited collections such as Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Film & History, Lit, Letras peninsulares, Short Film Studies, After Hitchcock, Authorship in Film Adaptation, Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, A Companion to Luis Buñuel, Genre Gender Race and World Cinema, and Hollywood at the Intersection of Identity.
At CU he teaches courses on Spanish and Latin American cinemas, on film theory and aesthetics, on directors Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, and on classic film genres, among them “The Hollywood Musical,” “American Horror Film,” “Lives of 007,” and “The Western & its Contexts.”
Professor Acevedo-Muñoz has spoken at conferences, meetings, and film festivals in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico, his native country. He has taught at NYU-Madrid (Spain), at the Cine Club Universitario of the State University of Zulia (Venezuela), and for the “Semester at Sea” Program (in 2012 and 2013) through nineteen countries and five continents around the world including Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Ghana, South Africa, India, Vietnam, China, and Japan.
Under his leadership, CU’s historic “Film Studies Program” was promoted to “Department” status, was granted its new name of “Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts,” and has received national recognition including mentions in “Best Program” lists from MovieMaker magazine and The Hollywood Reporter.