BIOGRAPHY

 

Violeta Ayala is a multifaceted creator, spanning the roles of filmmaker, technologist, writer, and artist. In 2020, she became the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Co-founding unitednotions.film and koa.xyz, Ayala has been instrumental in driving innovative projects. Her latest project, Prison X (2021), is an interactive VR animation that premiered to critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival and Cannes XR, and has been showcased at prestigious venues like the Forum Des Images in Paris, Games For Change in NY as well as galleries and museums in Santiago, Bogota, Prague, Warsaw, and Sydney, among others. Ayala's artistic work "Las Awichas" (grandmothers in Aymara), a series of large format prints honoring her female ancestors with the use of AI, first opened in September 2022 at the prestigious El Martadero art gallery in Bolivia. Subsequently, this work has been selected for the GLoW3 major exhibition at King's College London in March 2024, where it will incorporate augmented reality (AR), showcasing the fusion of traditional art with advanced digital storytelling techniques. Her award-winning documentaries, including La Lucha (2023) which is in competition at the Blackstar Film Festival 2023, Cocaine Prison (2017), The Fight (2017), The Bolivian Case (2015), and Stolen (2009), have premiered at major film festivals such as Sundance, and Toronto. These films have been broadcast on various platforms including PBS, Channel 8, Señal Colombia, Ibermedia, World, Amazon Prime, and The Guardian. Her accolades include more than 50 awards and nominations, such as a Walkley (Australia’s Pulitzer), and nominations for the IDA (Los Angeles), Rory Peck (London), Platino (Panama), and Fenix (Mexico). In 2023, she was awarded the XR Innovation Award at the Games For Change festival for 'Weaving Worlds', a prototype developed in a swift 28-hour Brain Jam that showcases her prowess in rapid ideation and execution within the extended reality (XR) medium. Her creative portfolio includes a metaverse space in Voxels, which won the overall honorable mention at the Indigenous Futurism Model-Making Competition of Yale University’s center for architecture. In 2023, Violeta co-designed Expylab, a groundbreaking experiment in Latin American futurism. This project won Meta’s metaverse community grant, with Expylab being one of the 10 communities selected as grantees for the Metaverse Communities Challenge. Currently, Violeta is working with character and metaverse creation through syntography, algorithmic art, and AI model training, pushing the boundaries of storytelling and artistic expression. 

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