Violeta Ayala

Violeta Ayala (born Violeta Michelle Ayala Grageda; 16 February 1978) is a Bolivian-Australian Quechua filmmaker, artist and technologist. Her credits include ''Huk, The Jaguaress'' (2025), ''Las Awichas'' (2024), ''Prison X – The Devil & The Sun'' (2021) and the documentaries ''La Lucha'' (2023), ''Cocaine Prison'' (2017), ''The Fight'' (2017), ''The Bolivian Case'' (2015), and ''Stolen'' (2009).

Early life and education

Ayala was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1978, the daughter of Fanny Grageda and Efrain Ayala. Ayala's maternal grandfather was the political Quechua leader Vitaliano Grageda, He was one of the founders and a former Secretary General of the Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia. Vitaliano Grageda was an active member of The Communist Party of Bolivia.

Her mother was a biochemist and had a pharmacy, her father immigrated to Sydney, Australia when Ayala was a child. She has two half-brothers from her mother's subsequent relationship with docto
Roly Elias
She grew up in the south part of Cochabamba, one of the city's poorest areas. Following her mother's death in 1995, Ayala immigrated to Australia.

Ayala is a graduate of Charles Sturt University where she majored in Broadcast Journalism.

Film career

In 2006 Ayala began her collaboration with Dan Fallshaw on ''Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea'', a documentary set in Mauritania, about corruption in the oil industry, that follows the investigations of mathematician Yahyia Ould Hamidoune against Woodside Petroleum. On the same subject Ayala co-wrote ''Slick Operator'' an article published in the front page of ''The Sydney Morning Herald''.

Ayala's feature directorial debut, the highly controversial documentary ''Stolen'' (2009), premiered internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2009.

In 2015 Ayala made ''The Bolivian Case'', a feature about a high profile case concerning three Norwegian teenage girls caught with 22 kg of cocaine in an airport in Bolivia. The film was shot in Cochabamba and Oslo, premiered in the Special Presentation Program at Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in May 2015, has won an audience award at the Sydney Film Festival and was shortlisted for Platino Awards and Premios Fénix.

Ayala's short film ''The Fight'' (2017) focused on a protest by a group of people with disabilities that march across the Andes in wheelchairs and on foot for 35 days to the seat of the government in La Paz, asking to speak to President Evo Morales about a disability pension and were repressed by the police. The film was released worldwide by The Guardian in May 2017 and has won a Walkley Award, the Deutsche Welle Doc Dispatch Award at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, as well as a nomination for an IDA Documentary Award and was a finalist for the Rory Peck Sony Impact Award.

Ayala is an alumnus of the Film Independent Documentary Lab, the Berlinale Talent Campus, HotDocs Forum, Britdoc Good Pitch, IFP and a Sundance and Tribeca Film Institute fellow.

Ayala's documentary ''Cocaine Prison'' was filmed inside San Sebastian prison in Cochabamba, by the inmates themselves, giving a unique perspective on the foot soldiers of the drug trade. ''Cocaine Prison'' premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017 and has won the audience award at the Rencontres Cinémas d'Amérique Latine de Toulouse.

In 2018, Ayala received a Jaime Escalante Medal in a ceremony organized by the Embassy of Bolivia in Washington, D.C.

In 2020, Ayala was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 2021, Ayala's ''Prison X'' a virtual reality animated experience premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2023, ''La Lucha'', premiered at the Blackstar Film Festival and SXSW Sydney. The documentary follows La Caravana, a significant disability rights protest in Bolivia, and its role in establishing a monthly pension for people with disabilities —earned Ayala the NYWIFT ''Award for Excellence in Documentary Directing.''

Art and technology projects

Ayala created ''Las Awichas'' (Aymara for “grandmothers”), a series of AI‑generated digital portraits honouring her female ancestors. The exhibition opened on 21 September 2022 at th
Martadero
cultural centre in Cochabamba.

In July 2023 it was announced that ''Las Awichas'' had been selected for the ne
GLOW
exhibition in London. The project was later presented, from March to April 2024, as a new commission on the Strand and inside King’s College London’s Bush House Arcade; the installation combined the digital portraits with augmented‑reality experiences, 3D‑printed Amazonian animals and hand‑woven textiles. ''Las Awichas'' won ''Best Interactive Experience'' at AIDC 2025.

In 2024 Ayala was selected for the inaugural Mila Quebec AI Art Residency, where she developed ''Huk, The Jaguaress'', an interactive installation that combines robotic vision, real‑time generative video and a multilingual synthetic voice to personify an Indigenous AI guardian of the Amazon. The work premiered on 5 March 2025 in the INTER:ACTIVE programme of CPH:DOX at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and was shown out of competition from 9 to 13 April 2025 at the 8th NewImages Festival at th
Forum Des Images
in Paris.

Personal life

Ayala has lived in Australia and the United States and has dual Bolivian-Australian nationality.

She is married to filmmaker Dan Fallshaw, with whom she has a child, born in June 2016.

Controversy

In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown in Sydney, Ayala publicly supported the rent strike movement. Ayala's statement "People are losing their lives and livelihoods, we can’t see our loved ones, our five-year-old doesn’t go to school and the real estate agent says it’s business as usual?"

In 2022, Ayala criticized the Sundance Festival for hosting the movie ''Jihad Rehab'', which interviewed former Guantánamo Bay prisoners. Ayala wrote on twitter that "an entirely white team" was "behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men." However, the film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.

Filmography

*''Proyecto Vila-Vila'' (2005, Documentary)
*''Between The Oil and The Deep Blue Sea'' (2005, Documentary)
*''Stolen'' (2009, Documentary)
*''The Bolivian Case'' (2015, Documentary)
*''The Fight'' (2017, Short Documentary)
*''Cocaine Prison'' (2017, Documentary)
*''Prison X'' (2021, VR Animation)
*''La Lucha'' (2023, Documentary)
*Las Awichas (2024, AR Animation)
*Huk, The Jaguaress (2025, AI Animation)

Awards

References

External links

*
Official website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ayala, Violeta
1978 births
Living people
Australian film directors
Australian women film directors
Bolivian film directors
Bolivian women film directors
Charles Sturt University alumni
People from Cochabamba