Violeta Ayala

Violeta Ayala (born Violeta Michelle Ayala Grageda; 16 February 1978) is a Bolivian-Australian Quechua filmmaker, artist and technologist. Her credits include 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 doctor 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.

Art projects
Ayala created Las Awichas (grandmothers in Aymara), a series of digital portraits with AI in honour of her female ancestors. The exhibition opened on 9/21/2022 at the Martadero

In July 2023, it was announced that Violeta Ayala's project Las Awichas was selected for the new GLOW3 exhibition in London. Las Awichas opened as a new commission at The Strand and KCL Bush House Arcade from March to April 2024, including the series of digital portraits, Augmented Reality experiences, 3D printed animals, and hand-woven art

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)