Biography

Monica Villamizar is a Colombian-American filmmaker and TV correspondent. She directed and produced the documentary "Transition" about an Australian trans journalist who embeds with the Taliban after the collapse of Afghanistan. The film Premiered at Tribeca 2023 and was selected for the Sheffield Documentary Festival where it was nominated for the Tim Hetherington Award.

She was a producer on the Nat Geo documentary "The First Wave" directed by Matthew Heineman, about New York's biggest Covid-19 Hospital, which won the 2022 EMMY for Best Documentary.

Monica also produced the SHOWTIME series The Trade (Season Two) on Human Trafficking and Immigration, which premiered at The Sundance 2020 Film Festival, and was recently nominated for 4 EMMY's including best documentary.

As a journalist she has won 2 EMMYS and was nominated for the prestigious One World Media "Journalist of the Year 2015 Award", which honors the best journalists in the world in all forms of media, print, radio and TV.

Monica has traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Mali, Congo DRC, Mexico, El Salvador and Haiti and other countries, at times filming directly on the front lines. She has covered the drug wars in Colombia and Mexico, gaining exclusive access to cartels and smugglers. She covered the Arab spring, the war against ISIS in Iraq and the advance of jihadism in West Africa. In September 2019 she reported on an experimental Ebola vaccine and was a subject of the trial led by Dr Anthony Fauci. She covered the Ebola outbreak of Eastern Congo DRC until her team and WHO doctors came under attack by rebel militias.

In her attempts to tell truthful, hard-hitting stories, Monica has been targeted by the Egyptian military which raided her office in Cairo and arrested her colleagues, and more recently by the Venezuelan Government who falsely accused her of being a spy, and issued an arrest warrant for her - her work as a journalist was backed by The New York Times editorial board which denounced the Maduro Government. This ignited her interest and active involvement in "Freedom of the Press" campaigns. Monica is an active member of the Frontline Freelance Register which protects and promotes the integrity of freelance conflict reporters all over the world.
- IMDb mini biography by: Toby Muse