Biography

Juan Francisco Pérez Villalba is a Colombian film director and screenwriter based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and a six-time Emmy Award winner. His work across film and television has earned awards and nominations across four continents. His filmography includes the science-fiction short Loop (2019), the twelve-episode web series Déjà Vu (2013), and the fantasy drama Our World (2012). His narrative work spans science fiction, fantasy, drama, and romance, using genre to explore questions of time, memory, love, free will, and the consequences of our choices.

In 2012, he wrote and directed Our World, a fantasy drama about a man and a woman inside a mental health institution who fall in love and create an imaginary world to escape their reality. The film received seven awards, including the Telefónica Award for Creativity in Digital Content, and was nominated for Best New Creator at the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI). The project introduced themes that would recur throughout his work, including the tension between reality and imagination, intimate human relationships, and the ways memory can reshape our experience of the past.

In 2013, Pérez Villalba premiered Déjà Vu, a twelve-episode science-fiction web series he created and directed when serialized fiction for the web was still emerging as a narrative format. The series earned fourteen awards at festivals across the Americas and Europe, including recognition for directing and screenwriting, and later expanded into television and VOD distribution. It strengthened his interest in serialized storytelling and in using science fiction not simply as spectacle, but as a way to explore the relationship between time, choice, consequence, morality, and emotional conflict.

In 2019, he premiered Loop at BOGOSHORTS Bogotá Short Film Festival. The science-fiction short, which he wrote and directed, follows a man who uses a time machine to save his own life while risking becoming trapped inside a temporal paradox. The film earned eight awards, including the FantLatam Grand Prize for Best Latin American Short Film of the Year, and was later distributed theatrically, on television, and through VOD platforms. The project deepened a recurring fascination in Pérez Villalba's work with time travel, its paradoxes, and the consequences of trying to change the past.

His feature screenplay Despite the Rain (A pesar de la lluvia) was selected for two Ibero-American development programs: the Residencia Iberoamericana de Guion and FantasoLab, a development lab for fantastic film projects. Combining science fiction and romance, the story follows a scientist who uses time travel in an attempt to repair a failed relationship, confronting temporal paradoxes that challenge the possibility of changing the past. The screenplay reflects a broader approach in Pérez Villalba's work: using scientific ideas as a way to explore love, regret, free will, and the human difficulty of accepting the past.

In 2019, Pérez Villalba founded Short Now, an independent production company through which he developed, wrote, directed, and produced fiction and documentary projects that secured four competitive production grants and commercial distribution agreements. Among them was La Relatividad del Amor (2022), a science-fiction romantic comedy that continued his exploration of time travel and its paradoxes and was released theatrically at Cinemark theaters in Colombia.

Pérez Villalba's career in U.S. television began at Univision Nevada in 2023, where he worked as a News Branding Specialist, developing campaigns and short-form content from concept through directing, cinematography, editing, and final delivery. His television work has earned six Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Pacific Southwest Chapter. He received his first Emmy for short-form editing during his first year in U.S. television; the following year, he won five Emmy Awards in a single ceremony, with recognition spanning directing, news promotion, editing, human-interest storytelling, and news photography. In 2026, he joined Telemundo Las Vegas, part of NBCUniversal, as a Creative Services Producer, developing, writing, directing, and producing promotional campaigns, multiplatform content, and commercials for station clients.
- IMDb mini biography by: Juan Francisco Pérez Villalba

[Director's Cameo] Often plays a small role in all his projects (the voice of the police officer that the chief police call through the phone radio to ask for some back up in El Maletín (2010), the patient that Sarah confused with Dave in Our World (2012), the man who appears at the beginning of the episode 10 having a Déjà Vu in Déjà Vu (2013)).

Déjà Vu (2013) was his thesis project for his Social Communication degree at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, for which he received an Honorable Mention in 2012 as meritorious undergraduate work.

Studied Social Communication with an emphasis in Audiovisual Production at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Colombia.

He won the Telefonica Award for Creativity in Digital Content at the XIV Encuentro Latinoamericano de Facultades de Comunicación Social (the most important meeting of this kind in Latin America) for Our World (2012).

He won the award for Best Narrative Film at the XIV Encuentro Latinoamericano de Facultades de Comunicación Social (the most important meeting of this kind in Latin America) for Our World (2012).