Dolores Creel Miranda

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Dolores Creel Miranda is a Mexican politician. She has served as the National Coordinator of the Special Projects Unit (UPX) of the Mexican Council for Culture and the Arts from 2001 to 2004 period. Her concern was to continue the historical development of the Arts in Mexico, directing the UPX, an Organization dedicated to support the production, display and distribution of Artistic works that use experimental digital technology. The most prominent position she has held was her 2000–2003 appointment as director for Special Projects Unit of the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA) and also as director of the International Festival of Video and Electronic Arts. She has had a long experience as a documentary artist, video artist and director of Series of Cultural Television and Radio.

On 13 April 2004 opposition congressmen from the Party of the Democratic Revolution ("PRD") sought to have criminal charges to be brought against her, accusing her of misappropriation of public money (in the amount of some MXN $2 million) while she held that job. The criminal charges this politicians sought to be brought against her where never filed, the purpose of this allegations where to oppose the candidacy of her brother Santiago Creel Miranda the minister of Interior Political Affairs. These events took place in February 2004 in the middle of a very tough battle before the elections for the next candidate to the Presidency of Mexico in the PAN party. According to the more trusted polls Santiago Creel Miranda was the politician preferred by the majority of the Mexican population for the candidature of Presidency. This congressman from the PRD party claimed, for example, that she went to India to make a documentary about Octavio Paz and stayed in luxury hotels, but on the contrary the shooting of the film took place in small towns where it was difficult to find hotels that had more than three or four stars. Also they argued that nobody ever saw the film she made. The film has not been able to be finished because after seven days of scouting and shooting in Rajastan India on December 2003, the Council of Arts decided to cancel the project, apparently due to the lack of economical resources in the field of Culture for the year 2004.

On 2000 the UPX was created based in a project send by Dolores Creel Miranda to the Council for Culture and the Arts as a proposal to support in Mexico the field of the Digital Arts. She has created a laboratory of Digital Arts where she had the responsibility as the Executive Producer of 90 experimental works, and the National and International Exhibitions. She had directed seven experimental programs related to the contemporary poets of the 20 century in Mexico as part of her work in the laboratory. On the credits of the 90 experimental works the direction, scriptwriting, editing and acting had been made by more than two hundred Mexican artists, their collaboration has been fundamental and had benefit the culture in Mexico. There are letters of foreign artist like Peter Campus and Bill Viola well known Videoartist, David Ross, curator and ex-director of MOMA Museum of San Francisco and Whitney Museum of New York, and Ron Fricke cinematographer, some of them addressed to the President Vicente Fox, explaining the international meaning of the UPX and thanking Dolores Creel Miranda for her work of opening frontiers with this project. Also around hundred Mexican artists have sign a document supporting the work done on the UPX and asking the President Fox the survival of this laboratory.

Dolores Creel Miranda also has been the director of the International Video and Electronic Art Festival, which in 2002 brought together more than 20,000 visitors in its 10 day duration, and the collaboration of more than fifty well-known artists and curators from all the world. This festival had a special homage to the videoartist Bill Viola in the Palace of the Arts. It was the first time in the Palace of the Arts in Mexico that Videoart had been shown and considered a fundamental expression of our time.

In 2005 and 2006 Dolores Creel Miranda has been developing a film project inspired on the concept of time and space in the poems of T. S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, and Valmiky. This film is in the process of being develop due largely to the collaboration of the cinematographer Ron Fricke most noted for his Direction of Photography on Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka, and the special collaboration of Kronos Quartet. Also farther support has been received from Rearden Studios, American Zoetrope and the Bay Area Video Coalition BAVC.

Dolores Creel Miranda is the sister of Santiago Creel, the former interior minister in President Vicente Fox's cabinet who was currently campaigning to be the National Action Party's candidate in the 2006 presidential election.

On 12 February 2007, the SFP (Secretaría de la Función Pública) took the decision of disabling Dolores Creel Miranda for 10 years of any public position and a penalty of over MXN $1.6 million for law and budget normativity violations. And ex-congressmen still request criminal prosecution. The SFP had not any proofs supportinng their decision, the case is now being investigated by the Mexican Court. Dolores Creell Miranda has begin her defense with an important group of lawyers in Mexico, Gonzalo Aguilar Zinser and Santiago Montero. The confusion in the accusation and decision taken by the SFP is related to political manipilation of power and not in the true facts.