Valerie Castillo Martinez is a Filipino-American writer and producer who grew up in the Philippines. She holds an MBA from Wilmington University and is a US Air Force veteran.

She has an MFA in Film from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City.

She has written, directed and produced several projects set in the US and international locations. She started her own development and production company, IndieFlip, to make films that deal with underrepresented subjects and cross-cultural themes.

Her thesis film Pria (2016), set in Indonesia, earned her the Entertainment Partners Best Producer Award and a Caucus Foundation grant. It received awards from the National Board of Review, Director’s Guild of America, and became Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival’s first Oscar-qualifying short film as recipient of the Golden Reel Award.

Her next short, “The President’s Visit” (2017), set in Lebanon, received grants from the Katharina Otto Bernstein Film Fund, Doha Film Institute and Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, also playing at CineMed and Dubai Film Festival.

She completed a fellowship at Film Independent’s Project Involve program where she produced a satirical dark comedy “Great Again” and a stop-motion clay-animated piece “The Mud”, which premiered at the 2017 Los Angeles Film Festival.

She is currently in development for her first feature film Death of Nintendo with director Raya Martin. The screenplay won Faculty Honors at the Columbia University screenplay competition and participated in the 2017 Tribeca Film Institute Network.