Biography

Laura Angélica Simón is a writer and director based in Los Angeles. Born in Mexico to parents from Sinaloa and Sonora, Spanish is her native language. At six-years-old, she moved to the U.S., and when she was ten, her parents opened a paletas business in El Mercado in East L.A. Simón helped support her family by selling the popsicles on the street corners of her neighborhood. After winning a scholarship to Claremont McKenna College in California, she became the first member of her family to attend college.

Her personal immigration odyssey led to the making of her first film, the documentary Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary. The Rockefeller Foundation named the documentary one of the "ten most important films on American race relations." It won several major awards, including the "Freedom of Expression Award" at the Sundance Film Festival and the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award which is given by the committee that chooses the Pulitzer Prize candidates.

Her career in Hollywood began when she was one of ten chosen from a pool of 3000 applicants for the Disney Screenwriting Fellowship. She became the first Mexican-born woman to write a produced Hollywood movie and earn an Emmy nomination.

She has worked as a fiction and non-fiction storyteller with 20th Century Fox, MGM Pictures, Discovery Channel, Walt Disney Motion Pictures, ABC Family, Vh1/MTV Films, New Line Pictures, PBS Independent Documentary Series, and Virgin/MTV's Rock the Vote campaigns. Her written articles cover various subjects including the restitution of the Klimt paintings from Austria to the legal Jewish heirs.

Her company, Café de Nadie Productions, develops film, television, documentary, and podcast content. She is also a guest lecturer in Latine Studies at Claremont-McKenna College.
- IMDb mini biography by: Cafe de Nadie Productions