The UNTITLED YOUNG LORDS PROJECT is a dramatic, episodic series that charts the rise and fall of the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party, through the coming of age stories of an ensemble cast.
Born in Chicago and New York at the height of the Sixties black power movement, Women’s and LGBT Liberation, and the Vietnam War the Young Lords asked and answered for its generation the classic existential question: who am I and what is my relationship to America? In so doing, it challenged the age-old denigration of Latinos in the United States and their banishment to the shadows of their own country.
The Young Lords also captured the essence of the Latino experience in migration, and life lived between two competing cultures: the old world their parents left behind but recreated in the privacy of home on the one hand and the vastly different world their children encountered in America’s mean streets, on the other. The ensemble cast in UNTITLED YOUNG LORDS PROJECT explore political themes in the context of a coming of age story about social rejection, sexual exploration, teenage individuation, and self discovery in the face of tragedy, friendship, and love.
Cionín is an award winning Latina filmmaker from Brooklyn, New York. She just completed a feature documentary as the director, writer, and co-producer, Three (Extra)Ordinary Women, which is currently making the film festival rounds.
She is the Senior Video Producer for the Brooklyn Museum and recently was the Showrunner on two Peacock/T+ unscripted series. She started her career at MTV Networks where for over 15 years she worked on celebrity driven programming for MTV News & Docs, MTV International, MTV Latin America and MTV tr3s, including as Director of two short documentaries on Shakira, and Field Director of MTV Cribs for 5 years. Later, as Supervising Producer/Showrunner, she oversaw a team of over 30 people for the production of 70 episodes that were produced within three years. Recently, she was the story producer of the 2021 Imagen Award winning short film Lights, Camera Acción for American Masters (PBS) and the 2018 Imagen Award winning PBS Great Performances documentary John Leguizamo’s Road to Broadway. She is currently in the final stages of production on a feature documentary on families raising children with disabilities, while researching, developing, and consulting on content that touches upon decolonization, climate change, and the arts.
Johanna Fernández, Author, Professor of History, Organizer; rights holder to IP book "The Young Lords, a Radical History"
Mickey Melendez, Author, Activist, Professor, Writer; rights holder to IP book "We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with The Young Lords"
