Hebert Poll Gutiérrez, Arts Curator

Hebert Poll Gutiérrez is a Cuban Canadian multidisciplinary artist, playwright, poet, storyteller, and community arts creator with more than 21 years of professional experience in Canada and internationally. His artistic practice is guided by the belief that stories preserve memory, challenge silence, and create spaces for justice, empathy, and human connection. Across theatre, storytelling, poetry, spoken word, film, and community-engaged arts, he has developed projects exploring Afro-descendant identity, migration, cultural memory, belonging, and social justice. His work includes The Great Race, Blue Madness, Emí Laará: Little Stories to Dream, Whispers from the Black Gods, and Beyond the Postcard: Cuba’s Untold Stories, presented in Cuba, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and the Dominican Republic. Through these experiences, he has learned that the way stories are selected, framed, and shared with audiences is itself a form of cultural curation.

In addition to his artistic practice, Hebert brings 16 years of experience as a Recreation Program Leader, developing inclusive spaces and meaningful public experiences for diverse communities. His work has also placed him in conversations about representation, cultural access, and inclusion. In 2025, he participated in the roundtable Thrive, not Survive: Defining the Path to Growth and Success in Canada, hosted by the Black Immigration Thrive Coalition in Ottawa, as well as the Calgary Black Film Festival panel Is Enough Being Done to Boost Representation in the Arts and Entertainment Industry? He previously contributed to the panel Finding Your Inner Child: How to Create Content for Young Audiences (2023), sharing perspectives on storytelling and creative engagement.

His experience with film has strengthened his ability to critically engage with cinematic storytelling. As a reviewer for the THIRD Action Film Festival in Calgary (2025), he evaluated independent film submissions, considering storytelling, artistic execution, representation, and the relationship between cinematic language and narrative purpose. He is drawn to short films because of their ability to communicate urgent realities with intimacy and precision, illuminating overlooked stories and creating powerful connections around themes such as migration, inequality, identity, resilience, and resistance. As a curator, he seeks to support films that approach social justice not only as a subject, but as a lived experience shaped by history, memory, and community.

Hebert’s vision for the Calgary Justice Film Festival is to help create a program where screenings become opportunities for dialogue, connecting filmmakers and audiences through conversations, storytelling, poetry, and spoken word. This approach reflects his ongoing artistic practice, including his participation in the When Words Collide Festival 2026 in Calgary with his Afro-Cuban poetry workshop From Myth to Social Transformation and his project Beyond the Postcard: Cuba’s Untold Stories. He brings to CJFF not only his experience as an artist, but a curatorial perspective rooted in story, context, and community, believing that films can open conversations, challenge assumptions, and create meaningful encounters between audiences and the realities represented on screen. As bell hooks wrote, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”