Alfeu FranÁa was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1963. He studied Fine Arts at Pontificia Universidade Catolica (P.U.C.) and at the Escola de Artes Visuais (E.A.V.), both in Rio de Janeiro, and continued an independent education attending workshops in a variety of fields of Arts and film at the University of California, Los Angeles; American Animation Institute; Chelsea and Camberwell College of Arts (London), among other institutions. After a youth of intensive travel and art-house film going, Alfeu got an internship at Continental CableVision (Los Angeles) and soon after joined the animation team at Rede Globo, Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, Alfeu maintened his own art studio while performing a wide range of capacities in the country's film industry which included experimental pieces with the group Plus Ultra, participation in features from underground film director icon Julio Bressane and the production of industrial films for Brazil's oil giant Petrobras. In 1998 created Imagenax and started writing, directing and producing his own independent documentaries. Imagenax documentaries, mostly based on almost forgotten historical facts, were well received in important festivals worldwide ("It's All True, Sao Paulo; Margaret Mead, New York) and broadcast in France, Belgium and Switzerland by Planete Future. In 2001, Alfeu received a grant for "Personal Work" from San Francisco's Film Arts Foundation to produce "Ota Benga". Shortly afterward, his documentaries were acquired for distribution by the Center for Media and Independent Learning, University of California, Berkeley and are currently part of the collection of over 30 universities in the United States. In 2003, Alfeu was selected as an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA). He maintained a studio at the Headlands for a year and presented a series of video installations. He integrated screening commissions, reviewed film proposals and festival submissions for ITVS, New York Underground Film Festival and curated a series of films from the Brazilian director Jose Mojica Marins ( Ze do Caixao) that were presented at the 9th Cine Latino. Alfeu currently lives in New York. While he continues to develop new documentary projects for Imagenax, he also consults as an archival image researcher for a variety of projects, most recently "Empire Adrift", a book by Patrick Wilcken recently published by Bloomsbury, London.