Jim Mendiola is a Los Angeles based writer/director. His award-winning film Pretty Vacant, about a Sex Pistols obsessed Chicana punk rocker, has screened in numerous film festivals, museums, and colleges in the U.S. and Mexico. His one-hour movie called Come and Take It Day, was funded by Independent Television Service and developed at the 2000 Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. It was broadcast nationally on PBS in the fall of 2002. At his 2001 Artpace residency, in collaboration with visual artist Ruben Ortiz Torres, Mendiola completed Spaztec Goes to the Alamo, which the duo claims to be “the world’s first Chicano 3-D movie.” A 1997 Rockefeller Intercultural Media Fellow, Mendiola is a regular contributor on television, soap operas and all things Latino and pop for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and other publications. He has just completed his first feature film, a rock and roll digital movie called Speeder Kills. His favorite band is Bon Scott-era AC/DC.