Award-winning filmmaker and Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She founded the Latino Arts and Activisms collection at Columbia. Her notable works include the books Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (2004) and The Latino Media Gap (2014). Her films include Brincando el charco (1994) and Valor y Cambio (2019–2024), a project focused on art, storytelling, and social justice in Puerto Rico and New York.