Dr. Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker and educator whose work focuses on Black feminism, performance, autoethnography, visual anthropology, and Black spirituality. Raised in the Bronx, Dr. Guzman earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2019 before receiving a postdoctoral fellowship at Haverford College and a Research Associate fellowship at Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies and Religion Program. As of 2025, she is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her scholarship examines the role of performance, spirituality, and ritual throughout the African Diaspora, with emphasis on the Caribbean and the Global South.

As an experimental documentary filmmaker, Dr. Guzman explores African diasporic spiritual practices and their relationships to race, gender, and mental health. Her documentary short Smile4Kime (2023) tells the story of the friendship between herself and Kimberly Edwards ("Kime"), a Black woman who lived and struggled with mental health issues and suicidal ideation. Mixing animation, live-action cinéma vérité, and visual poetry to weave together the personal, spiritual, and political, Smile4Kime is an experimental autoethnography in the tradition of Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989). Dr. Guzman's most recent film (as of 2025) is Oríkì Oshun, the first of a planned quartet of shorts celebrating the Orishas of Yoruba-based religions that act as intermediaries between believers and the supreme being. Shot on Super 8mm, the film's production was imbued with ritual elements and divination intended to make the film an embodiment of spiritual practice rather than just a representation of it. 

The Elena Guzman Collection contains paper, audiovisual elements, digital files, and textile objects related to the productions of Smile4Kime and Oríkì Oshun. These include: artist statements, pitch decks, and grant applications; pre-production contracts, visual plans, budgets, scripts, cast/crew bios, and shot lists; raw production audio and footage (including original Super 8mm camera negatives for Oríkì Oshun); on-set production photos; test animations and rough cuts; outreach and distribution planning documents; and discussion guides meant to accompany the films. The collection also includes almost 40 props and hand-crafted costume pieces used in Oríkì Oshun's production, which were central to the ritual and spiritual processes of creating the film.