A chance meeting in Havana with the legendary Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez changed the course of Travis Wilkerson's life. His internationally recognized body of filmmaking crosses boundaries with documentary and fiction, performance, and activism. At the epicenter of his work is the ongoing search for meeting points of aesthetic eloquence and political engagement, produced with an absolute modesty of material resources, as self-sufficiently as possible. In 2015, Sight & Sound called Wilkerson “the political conscience of American cinema.” His films have screened at hundreds of festivals worldwide, including Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, and Locarno. He is the recipient of an UnDo Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Rockefeller Grant, as well as grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2025, he was included in the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows. "An Injury to One " (2002)-- was named one of the best avant-garde films of the decade by Film Comment and a "political-cinema landmark" by the LA Times. The New Yorker called “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” (2018) one of the "Sixty-Two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking."