Nail Tech: Portrait of an Artist
About the Film
Nail Tech: Portrait of an Artist (2025) explores the life and cultural impact of Miami Florida-based nail artist Kro Vargas, whose trend-setting designs have graced the pages of Vogue and the fingertips of major musical artists like Ice Spice and Ivy Queen. The film also explores the friendships and salons that have shaped Vargas’s career, like Optima Lite and Spring with Friends. The documentary highlights how nail art is a meaningful form of cultural expression. Telling the story of nail techs is telling a history of style, migration, and women’s entrepreneurship in Miami.
Directors: Jillian Hernandez, Elena Guzman
Producers: Jillian Hernandez, Elena Guzman
United States // 2025 // Documentary // Los Shorts
21 minutes
About the Filmmaker
Jillian Hernandez is a curator and scholar of contemporary visual art, popular culture, and style. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment was published by Duke University Press and she has recently contributed to the exhibition catalogue for The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century and the anthology Documenting the Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida and the founder of Full Set Project, a collective that studies the cultural impact of nail culture.
Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua filmmaker, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores ritual, memory, and spirituality in the African diaspora. Blending experimental film techniques with ancestral storytelling, she creates immersive, multisensory experiences that honor Black and Afro-Caribbean life. Her recent films include Smile4Kime (2023), an animated hybrid documentary on friendship, grief, and Afro-Puerto Rican spiritual practice, which received honorable mention for the Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology, and Best Documentary short from Flex Obscura film festival. Her second film, Oríkì Oshun (2025), which had its world premiere at Blackstar Film Festival, is an experimental short that reimagines the Yoruba Orisha Oshun through sacred story and praise poetry. Elena is a co-founder of the Ethnocine feminist filmmaking collective and co-producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films. Her work has been supported by Black Public Media, the Leeway Foundation, the Crossroads Foundation and the Scribe Foundation.
