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Andrea Guzmán Urzúa

Of Chilean background, Andrea Guzmán Urzúa was born in Madrid and raised in Cuba. She studied engineering in Havana; photography at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños (San Antonio de los Baños International School of Film and TV); and, later, audiovisual distribution at the Escuela de Cinematografía y del Audiovisual de la Comunidad de Madrid (Film and Audiovisual School of Madrid). She is a cultural manager, filmmaker, and co-artistic director of the international documentary film festival DocumentaMadrid.

Since 1993, she has worked professionally on film shoots; she also worked in film festivals until 2011. She has served as a coordinator and programmer for DocumentaMadrid, the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (Santiago International Documentary Film Festival), Miradas-Doc (Tenerife), the Festival de Málaga-Cine Español (Málaga Spanish Film Festival), and others. In 2011, she created El Mar Films in order to distribute and program auteur films independently. In 2007, she founded DOCMA, the documentary filmmakers’ association she headed until 2016, to promote and disseminate nonfiction cinema in Spain. At DOCMA, she dedicated her efforts to fostering, directing, and coordinating multiple seminars and screenings with international figures such as José Luis Guerin, Víctor Erice, Javier Corcuera, and Patricio Guzmán.

She has programmed documentary cinema at the Filmoteca Española, the Intermediae-Matadero, the Casa de América, the Cineteca Madrid, the Sala Berlanga, the Instituto Cervantes, and many other cultural associations. She has directed the festival 3XDOC / Encuentro de Creadores (Artists’ Gathering) since 2012 (with Heddy Honigman, Mercedes Álvarez, Victor Kossakovsky, Andrés Duque, the Sensory Etnographic Lab, and Peter Mettler). The fifth year of this event was celebrated in 2017 with Avi Mograbi and Ahmad Natche. She has participated as a juror in multiple film festivals (Alcances Cádiz, Mostra Latam de Lleida, Seminci Valladolid, Festival Espiello, Another Way Film Fest) and works as a funding adviser for Ecuador’s Consejo Nacional de Cinematografía (National Film Council), Proimágenes Colombia, and Canarias Cultura en Red. She has delivered talks in the MA program in creative documentary film at the IPECC (Madrid) and in the MA program in documentary filmmaking at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (King Juan Carlos University).