Violeta Ayala is an artist/writer/filmmaker from Bolivia. Her first feature documentary Stolen premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (2009), has screened in more than 80 festivals worldwide, winning fourteen awards along the way. In 2006 Ayala began her collaboration with Dan Fallshaw in North Africa on Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea an investigative documentary about corruption in the oil industry set in Mauritania. While at university Ayala made Proyecto Vila-Vila (2005), a documentary about cervical cancer and indigenous women in Bolivia. Ayala has a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Charles Sturt University, Australia. She is currently making two feature documentaries: Cocaine Prison (supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, IDFA’s Fund, Fonds Sud Cinema, the Strasbourg Film Fund, Screen NSW, Screen Australia and the Norwegian Film Institute) and The Bolivian Case (supported by the Norwegian Film Institute, NRK and the Puma Britdoc Catalyst Award). Ayala is an Alumnus of the Film Independent Documentary Lab, the Berlinale Talent Campus and a Tribeca Film Institute Fellow. She is also writing two screenplays El Comunista; based on her grandfather’s life and Cocaine Queens; based on her three-year experience filming inside prisons. She’s been invited to give master-classes at the National Film and Television School in London and the Edinburgh College of Art.

Accolades include Best Feature Doc at the 2010 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, Grand Prix at the 2010 Art of the Document Film Festival in Warsaw, Best Doc at the 2010 Anchorage International Film Festival, Best Doc at the 2010 African Film Festival in Nigeria and many more.