Marina Ortiz

Born and raised in East Harlem/El Barrio and the South Bronx, Marina Ortiz has drawn from her experience as a stateside Puerto Rican woman to craft a versatile body of work that includes broadcast, print, and web journalism, photography, spoken word, poetry, and other forms of cultural and political expression – with an emphasis on justice and liberation.

ADVOCACY JOURNALISM / CULTURAL EXPRESSSION

Marina Ortiz has been an avid documentarian of the Puerto Rican community for over 25 years.

During the 1990s, she produced public affairs, news, and cultural programming at Pacifica-WBAI Radio and was active in the Nuyorican spoken word poetry community.

Marina Ortiz has written political columns, cultural reviews, and news articles for alternative publications such as Liberator, El Pitirre, The Daily Challenge, The Shadow, The New York Planet, IndyMedia, Siempre, Tiempo NY, and the East Harlem Journal.
In 2004, she created VirtualBoricua.org – a non-commercial digital news and cultural outlet that documents Puerto Rican history, art, and politics. Marina Ortiz has since expanded the VirtualBoricua readership through Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.

Marina Ortiz is also the founder and president of East Harlem Preservation, by which she works with community residents and artists in El Barrio to preserve cultural landmarks such as the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center and create and restore outdoor murals honoring Puerto Rican leaders.
Marina Ortiz continues to chronicle Puerto Rican and East Harlem politics, culture, and history on a daily basis. By her own estimation, she has taken hundreds of thousands photographs and captured key moments in Boricua history that were often ignored by the mainstream media. Her most recent exhibition, “Lost and Found Murals of East Harlem,” was on display at the East Harlem Café in the fall of 2014.

POLITICAL ACTIVISM

Marina Ortiz has been involved in the Puerto Rican liberation movement for over 25 years, steadfastly supporting independence and the release of political prisoners. She is a co-founder of several NYC-based solidarity committees, “NY with UPR,” “NY Contra El Gasoducto,” and “New York Solidarity With Vieques,” that have provided local support to broad-based campaigns in Puerto Rico against university tuition increases, pension cuts, political repression, police brutality, and en