Professional Summary
Mary Leonard teaches, writes, and curates events that incorporate Literature, Film, Media and other Arts, often working across disciplinary and linguistic borders.
Dr. Leonard is the founder of the film program at the University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez. In 2004, she produced and directed Textos Tuertos (One-Eyed Texts), staged readings of the work of writers Rita Indiana Hernández and Hugo Rios read by the writers against a backdrop of projected images. She conceptualized, designed and directed two editions of Optika: A Symposium on Visual Narration at the University of Puerto Rico (2005 & 2007). She was co-director of Mapping New Caribbean Cinema, a conference held in the Dominican Republic and sponsored by the Dominican Festival of Global Cinema (2020). She is the co-founder and co-host of Caribbean Film Forum, online conversations on topics related to film in the context of the Caribbean (2021 - present) and co-coordinator of the Caribbean Film Education Network (2022 – present). Dr. Leonard is one of the recipients of a National Endowment of the Humanities grant for the 2022 year that funded the establishment of an Oral History Center at UPRM. For this project, she worked with oral historians on the design of interdisciplinary courses in which oral historians and documentary filmmakers work together with communities to document their stories. She is one of the directors of Mare Nostrum: A Symposium on Central American and Caribbean Film, a conference that took place in Panama City, Panama in April 2025 in association with IFF Panamá, the Panamanian film festival. She has also been a juror at film festivals in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
Dr. Leonard’s publications on Caribbean cinema include “Wind, Water, Women: Liminal Spaces and Border Crossings Between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic” (Black Camera, 2019), “De la DIVEDCO al Documental Contemporáneo en Puerto Rico” (Exégesis, 2019-20), a review of Los Viejos Cines de Puerto Rico by José Hernandez Mayoral (Vivomatografías 2021), a review of Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building (H-Net - Caribbean 2024), a review of Creole Cinemas, Memory Traces forthcoming in Romanische Forschungen, “El Lente Cosmopolita de Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias” (La Gran Pantalla Dominicana, Almenara, 2023) and "Hacia un cine caribeño más conectado"," forthcoming in Cuadernos FEISAL.
In Cincinnati, she has curated film series included in the programming of two Fotofocus biennials: Jurakán, a series about hurricanes from Caribbean perspectives (2022), and Caribbean Eye (2024). In April 2025, she presented the Dominican film It Runs in the Family at the Woodward Theater. In September 2025, she presented the film Pepe, winner of the best director award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024. All of these presentations have included question and answer sessions with the filmmakers.
Mary Leonard’s writing about a variety of arts-related topics can be found on her website: www.maryleonard.org. News and information about films, filmmakers and filmmaking in the Caribbean, and Caribbean Eye screenings in greater Cincinnati and beyond are posted on her Instagram: @caribbean__eye.