Raquel Cepeda
Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, Raquel Cepeda is a writer, director, producer, and author.
Cepeda’s latest film, the award-winning “La Madrina: The [Savage] Life of Lorine Padilla" is streaming on SHOWTIME. Directed, written, and produced by Cepeda, the documentary follows a beloved South Bronx matriarch and former “First Lady” of the Savage Skulls gang as she struggles to remain visible in a rapidly gentrifying community she helped rebuild in the 1980s. Employing rich never-before-seen archives of the borough that gifted the world both salsa and hip-hop culture, we will go on a complicated and, at times, surreal journey through five decades of Bronx history and resilience in La Madrina's own words.
Cepeda’s documentary film, "Some Girls," focuses on a group Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, the white supremacist narratives about American history they’ve been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. Cepeda's first documentary feature, "Bling: A Planet Rock," is about American hip-hop's obsession with blinging and how that intersected itself into the decade-long blood-diamond conflict.
Cepeda is currently developing several documentary and narrative projects under her production shingle, Resurgent Pictures.
