María Rojas Arias is a filmmaker, visual artist, and producer. Her cinematic work confronts and questions issues of inheritance, migration, ecological trauma, environmental impacts, archives, and memory concerning structural violence. She holds a Master's degree in film and multimedia art from KASK Conservatorium University College Ghent (2021, Belgium), where she received an honorary degree. She co-founded La Vulcanizadora, a laboratory for creation in film and art based in Colombia. Her work was recently presented at the Cinema for All Pavilion at the Thailand Biennale, ICA London, Hangar Lisboa.
For her film Abrir Monte (2021), which screened at multiple festivals, received the Short Joy Award at the Ji. hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Best Short Film at the Valdivia International Film Festival and Kinoforum Brazil, and was awarded the Next Generation Grant from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development (The Netherlands). She worked with both official and unofficial archival material, seeking to articulate, in an expanded way, the relationships with specific past events that shaped national discourses, war politics, extractivism, and the founding and colonization of spaces.
While at MacDowell, she worked on the development of her first feature-length documentary titled Una Sola Tierra, a counter-history of a utopian city in the Orinoquía-Amazonía region that was transformed into a military base, erasing the land beneath colonial plantations, instead of realizing the futuristic city that was never built.
Portrait by Adrian Tambien
