THE KNIGHT NEWS (QUEENS COLLEGE) -- Being a leader for the next generation is what Anaiis Cisco strives to be. Cisco, a Queens College graduate, is a black, queer filmmaker pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema at San Francisco State University. Cisco’s films focus on the experiences of underrepresented racial, ethnic, queer and gender minorities in the United States.
“I was a black student wanting to gather media students to talk about the responses we had to not seeing people who looked like us and just converse with each other because that’s what learning is,” Cisco said. “I grew up learning about class, race and gender, but what about queerness?”
Cisco tackled queer experiences after she left Queens College with her film Wet Clothes, which focuses on changing the perception of domestic rituals like washing clothes by infusing laundromat visuals with the sounds of women orgasms as a way to normalize pleasure.
“We see black female bodies violently depicted and hyper-sexualized but we never know the sounds that these bodies make,” Cisco shared. “I wanted to normalize pleasure in a way that it’s not just sexual but there’s pleasure that we receive just from cleaning.”