Libia Batista will be a juror for the 2020 Oscar awards

August 2, 2020

Cuban casting director Libia Batista is the first professional of her specialty in Latin America and the Caribbean to have been selected to be part of the jury for the Oscar awards.

Batista has worked in cinema for four decades and will join a list of 819 new members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of the United States.

The news reached her through Iván Giroud, president of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. He wrote to congratulate her and sent her the link to a publication in which her name appeared alongside that of two other Cubans: actress Ana de Armas and musician Arturo Sandoval.

"I checked my email again," she told the Cubacine portal, "and I had one from the president of the Academy, David Rubin, inviting me to be a member of it, for which I had to fill out a very long document in English, but today I already have a registration number and everything."

"In summary, I repeat to you, not even in my dreams did I imagine being part of the jury of specialists who award films in different genres each year. I will have to coordinate with Jorge Perugorría (Pichi), who already belonged to the Academy to watch and evaluate the films."

In the 1980s Batista began at the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industries (ICAIC) as a production secretary, and began as a casting director with the French series Indigo Blue.

She has been working for 40 years thanks to Miguel Mendoza, Mayra Segura, Susana Ríos, Roberto Viñas and Tania Carvajal, who were her teachers. She entered the ICAIC in the eighties as a production secretary and Miguel, because of my charisma, told me that I was going to do casting. I began in that role with the French series Indigo Blue and since then has not stopped working on films, series, videoclips and other audiovisuals.