Bee Guzman-Elliott’s film “BROKEN PROMISES” awarded grand prize

still from Broken Promises showing a person in coveralls standing on scaffolding in front of a painted background

IAS alum Bee Guzman-Elliott's experimental film, “BROKEN PROMISES,” was awarded Grand Prize Winner in The Artist Forum 2021 Spoken Word Competition; the politics of emotion.

"BROKEN PROMISES is a performance art/spoken word short that expresses Guzman-Elliott's grief and love as a young person living through the 6th mass extinction in the age of the Anthropocene. The film is a call for transformative action that begins with (re)kindling our ability to feel–our ability to grieve and dive beneath the surface of "climate change" to start healing a deadly addiction to fossil fuels from the inside out. Broken Promises explores an abstracted embodiment of the idea that what we do to the world, we do to ourselves."

Bee developed her work with guidance and support from IAS faculty members Anida Yoeu Ali and Carrie Bodle while still a student at UW Bothell, from which she graduated in 2021 with a bachelor's in Environmental Studies. She is currently pursuing a master's in Climate & Society at Columbia.