Raquel Cepeda

Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, writer and documentary filmmaker Raquel Cepeda is the author of the forthcoming book Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, part memoir and part chronicle of Cepeda's year-long journey to discover the truth about her ancestry while looking at what it means to be Latina today. Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, released the book on March 5, 2013. She is currently in production on Deconstructing Latina, a documentary focusing on a group of troubled teenage girls in a suicide prevention program who are transformed through an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing.

Cepeda directed and produced the NAMIC (National Association for Multi- ethnicity In Communications) Vision nominated film Bling: A Planet Rock, a feature length documentary about American hip-hop culture's obsession with diamonds and all of its social trappings, particularly how the infatuation with "blinging" became intertwined in Sierra Leone's decade long conflict, co-produced the with VH1/MTV Networks and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Continued on http://www.djalirancher.com/about