- Born
- Birth nameVioleta Michelle Ayala Grageda
- Height5′ 6″ (1.68 m)
- Violeta Ayala is a Quechua filmmaker, writer, artist and technologist. Her credits include Prison X (2021), a VR animation that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Cocaine Prison (2017), The Fight (2017), The Bolivian Case (2015) and Stolen (2009). Her films have premiered at A-List festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, screening in hundreds of festivals worldwide and distributed in cinemas in France and Bolivia and in platforms such as The Guardian, PBS, Amazon Prime and others. Violeta's won 50 awards, including a Walkey Award and nominations for the prestigious IDA in Los Angeles and the Rory Peck Sony Impact Award in London. In 2013 she was invited by Arianna Huffington to write an opinion column at the Huffington Post. In 2015 Violeta began developing projects in Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, she was a guest filmmaker featured in a conversation with the Foreign Director at CBS News Tony Calvin in Washington, DC. In 2018, Violeta won the Jaime Escalante medal-of-honor for her outstanding talent in filmmaking. Violeta gave a masterclass on the impact of journalism and storytelling at the Tempo Impact Conference in Stockholm and was a guest panelist at AIDC in Melbourne discussing the role of filmmakers in the fast changing media. In 2019 Violeta was invited to the Sundance Film Festival as a New Frontier Talent Fellow, she was one of nine leading New Media creators selected worldwide for the CPH Lab in Copenhagen. Violeta gave the keynote at the largest global network of organizations defending freedom of expression at IFEX 2019 in Berlin. The MIT in Boston invited her for a personal workshop developing her VR, AI and robotics practice. Violeta returned to Sundance 2020 as one of the guest luminaries for the MacArthur Foundation panel on "Editing History". On July 1st 2020, Violeta became the first Quechua filmmaker invited to join The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).- IMDb Mini Biography By: United Notions Film
- SpouseDan Fallshaw(April 23, 2012 - present) (1 child)
- I didn't think Morales would fall in love with power like he has. He's trying to change the constitution; we told him NO, the NO vote won, we told him "you have to go in 2019", but he says everything is a plot of the United States. If his wife left him, it would be because the gringos came to Bolivia! It's a little bit like Trump, in this populist sense - he's trying to appeal to the lowest common feelings of people: greed and fear. So, I believe we won't have long lasting democracies in Latin America until the War on Drugs ends. The drug trade is illegal; it runs on corruption. We don't want the Americans to come back into Bolivia and kill our people; at the same time, we don't want the Chinese to buy our resources. We have changed one colonial power for another.
- I'm very proud to be one of the two woman, nominated today at the Rory Peck Awards, diversity is also about recognizing, and I don't think there are less women journalists and filmmakers doing our job and next year I would like to see more women in my place, half of the nominees.
- Another thing I want to tell all my fellow filmmakers from Latin America is that we can take the power in our hands. It's time we tell our own stories and find our own narratives and were doing it! I think it's very important that we keep doing it and that filmmakers in Bolivia start owning our own stories and telling things in our own ways.
- I'm tired of this appropriation of stories by filmmakers from the West. I'm not saying they shouldn't make films in other countries, but they should be honest about where they're coming from. A film by a U.S. filmmaker in Mexico isn't a Mexican film - just like a film about a black person made by a white filmmaker isn't a black film. This misappropriation of stories just continues with the same colonialism we've become accustomed to and maintains the power structure of one group of people over the rest.
- At the moment, when we talk about the war on drugs and the victims of the drug trade we think of the consumers, most of whom are white. We don't see black, Latino or Indigenous kids, who sell drugs as victims-we treat them as criminals. And that's wrong, because they are only doing it because they need money.
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