
Dolissa Medina
Brownsville, TX
Dolissa Medina is a filmmaker, writer, and organizer from the borderlands of South Texas. Exploring themes of belonging and home, her experimental documentaries draw from journalism, found footage practice, and essay film traditions to interrogate the impact of hidden histories on experiences of place. Often engaged in queer world-mending through mythology, folklore, and confrontations with mortality, Medina’s films have screened at venues including The Whitney, Rotterdam International Film Festival, MIX-NYC, and Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen where she was also selected as an Oberhausen Seminar participant. A Fulbright Fellow, Medina has received support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, LEF, Puffin Foundation, and others. Medina holds an MFA in Visual Art from UC-San Diego and a BA in Journalism and History from San Francisco State University.
She is currently in production on her first feature, a personal documentary weaving 1980s history with a contemporary portrait of her hometown of Brownsville, Texas, a contested axis of migration and experimental rockets to Mars. She is also founder of Grito Viejito, an interdisciplinary artist collective using a Mexican folk dance to stage dialogues around health, HIV histories, and queer futures. The project’s first video, “Viejito/Enfermito/Grito (Old Man/Sick Man/Shout),” was commissioned by Visual AIDS and premiered on World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art 2023 in more than 150 venues throughout the globe. Fine art prints inspired by the film are available for collection through the Bureau of Queer Art Gallery on Artsy.net, with proceeds benefitting the project’s impact work in Mexican-American communities.

Dolissa Medina, Untitled, 2024
A Light for Ambiguous Loss
Dolissa Medina is a filmmaker and writer from the borderlands of South Texas whose work explores mortality and questions of home.
Artist BioA Light for Ambiguous Loss is a documentary meditation on the potential of a frozen image to heal frozen grief—what psychologists call “Ambiguous Loss.” In the hot, humid climate of South Texas, where migrants are found drowned in the Rio Grande river, a former Border Patrol Agent has developed a radical new technique to quickly identify the anonymous dead. The experimental practice combines innovative use of low-cost drugstore chemicals with extreme closeup photos of human skin—mediated through proper lighting—to reveal a high-resolution image of a “lost” fingerprint.
Circumventing the more time-consuming, costly, and not always successful DNA method, investigators send the digital image to databases run by federal agencies and foreign governments. An ID comes back in days, and the family of the missing loved one can at last find peace. Tom, the inventor of this emerging technique called Forensic Macrophotography, teaches his methods to investigators in an old shopping mall-turned workforce training campus in Brownsville, TX. There is no other program like this in the country. Only a handful of people in the world currently know how to take these critical pictures.
A Light for Ambiguous Loss is an experimental documentary about the people, places, and politics behind this experimental forensic practice. Playing with scale, the film tells stories behind the cases through fingerprint-inspired AI animation, liminal twilight shots of subtropical landscapes, and a lone figure creating death poses illuminated by a spotlight. The film asks people connected to the cases about their own experiences with Ambiguous Loss, as the film seeks answers to a paradoxical question—how do we live with people we love whose absence is ever-present?