Violeta Ayala

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).