Ramey’s Award-Winning Film, El Signo Vacío, Premiering in NY

School of Film, Television, and Media Arts Professor Kathryn Ramey‘s film, El Signo Vacío, is premiering May 8-10 at the Anthology Film Archive in New York City.

The film, a “feature-length anthropological journey through the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico,” was supported by a 2019 Creative Capital Award, and was honored in 2025 with the Richard Werbner Award for Visual Ethnography from the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival. Ramey also received a Guggenheim Fellows grant to complete the film.

El Signo Vacío (The Empty Sign) combines found footage (tourism, agricultural, and propaganda films) spanning the past century with contemporary portraits of Puerto Ricans.

“They’re not directly addressing the media, but actually talking about their own anti-colonialist work, which is actually quite varied,” Ramey said in 2019 of the artists, activists, climate scientists, politicians, journalists, musicians, farmers, and others she has talked to.