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Cristina Khuly is a Cuban-American sculptor, actress, environmentalist, and film director and producer based in New York. She was born in Miami, Florida on January 20th, 1970. She is best known for making the 2008 documentary, “Shoot Down.”

Khuly’s early career was in acting and modeling in the United States and abroad. From 1989-1999 she appeared in numerous print and screen advertisements including for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, New Woman, Brides, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and was in fashion campaigns such as ESPRIT, Valentino, Lilly Pulitzer and Benetton. She was featured in commercials for Meji ice-cream, Kirin beer, Honda's Vita in Japan, as well as for the cosmetics brand Clinique.

In the mid 1990’s, Khuly pursued an education in fine arts, studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, and Florida National University. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Florida International University in Miami in 1994. She worked in sculpture, painting, industrial design, graphic design and film and has won various awards for her art, including an Award in Sculpture from the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, PA, the New York Foundation for the Arts' Felissimo Design Award, and was the Miami Beach Art in Public Places "Electrowave Shuttle" Competition winner.

Her sculptural works have been displayed in gallery spaces and museums, including the Cooperstown Art Association in Cooperstown, NY; the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, PA; the Carnegie Mellon University's Hewlett Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA, and the Florida State University's Museum of Fine Arts in Tallahassee, FL. She has also produced commissioned works such as "Flight," which is on view as a permanent installation in Downtown Miami, Florida since 2002.

Khuly is Creative Director of Entertaining Ideas, which she co-founded in 2005 with her husband, Douglas Eger. Khuly has directed and produced films, including investing in the 2007 documentary film, “War/Dance,” which went on to win a number of awards and an Oscar nomination and making a short film about the Cuban sculptor Enrique Gay García. Khuly directed, narrated, and financed the 2008 documentary “Shoot Down,” which is about the events that took place on February 24th, 1996 around two aircraft operated by the Miami-based anti-Castro organization “Brothers to the Rescue” that were shot down while trying to enter into Cuban airspace. As the documentary shows, the details of the incident are still disputed to this day due to political interests and tensions. The “Brothers to the Rescue” incident resulted in the death of four men, including Khuly’s uncle, Armando Alejandre Jr, which created a deeply personal connection to the topic of the documentary. As Khuly says in a 2007 Miami Herald interview regarding making the film, “I was walking over the graves of dead relatives.''' Despite the political nature of the film, it was received by a wider audience. Currently, Khuly works on land conservation projects in Upstate New York with her husband.

The Key West Literary Seminar is a non-profit organization and annual conference for writers held in Key West, FL, founded in 1983 by the late novelist, David Kaufelt (1939-2014), and his wife, Lynn Kaufelt, who is the current President of the festival. David and Lynn Kaufelt moved to Key West from New York in 1974, shortly after David’s debut novel, Six Months with an Older Woman, was published. The idea for the Literary Seminar came about after a meeting David Kaufelt had with a group of New York publishers. The Council for Florida Libraries was hosting a lecture series and Kaufelt wanted the publishers to send a group of their top writers to attend; however, despite the long literary history of Key West and South Florida more broadly, with writers such as James Merrill, Thomas McGuane, and Tennessee Williams in residence at that time and Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Bishop having previously written books while on the island, the New York publishers felt that in Florida there was generally a lack of interest in the literary and refused Kaufelt’s request. A few years later, in 1983, the Kaufelts decided to organize a literary festival that would celebrate the literary history of Key West, while seeking to be a platform for the wider development of an entrenched literary culture.

KWLS meets for four days every January and explores a new theme year; previous themes have been on topics such as, “Tennessee Williams in Key West”; “American Writers and The Natural World”; “Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature”; and “Writers of the Caribbean.” Previously held at the Florida Keys Community College and currently at the San Carlos Institute, the conference is attended by writers and readers from all over the world, although its readings, conversations, lectures, and panel discussions are capped at a maximum of 375 participants, so as to ensure a distinctive intimate experience. In addition to the more typical conference activities, David Kaufelt organized and ran a guided literary walking tour to better acquaint conference attendees with the Key West architecture that was the backdrop to many notable works of literature; this tour currently operates year-round. Key West’s architectural heritage was particularly important to the Kaufelts specifically; they restored and renovated three homes in Key West’s Old Town, and Lynn Kaufelt also wrote a book, Key West Writer’s and Their Houses, on the subject. More recently, in 2019, KWLS acquired the home of the celebrated poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived on White Street during the 1930s and 1940s; it is their future goal to restore it to what it would have been like when she resided there.

Aside from the four-day conference, KWLS also runs a Writer’s Workshop Program – a small gathering of up to twelve writers and faculty to explore writing craft, held at various locations throughout Key West’s “Old Town”; and a Young Writer’s Studio, which offers summer writing instruction to local high school students. In order to share both the conference’s output and also, more generally, Key West’s literary history with as many people as possible, KWLS began their Audio Archives Project, whereby unique presentations from the conference are uploaded online to be viewed by people all over the world. In addition, KWLS’s open-access blog, LITTORAL, offers essays, interviews, and more pertaining to Key West and its literary history.

Laura Bass
UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020.