Jury & Awards 2026
Best Feature Film
Nava Mau
Nava Mau is an award-winning filmmaker, actress, and cultural worker from Mexico City and San Antonio, Texas. Nava wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Waking Hour and All The Words But The One, two short films that screened in festivals around the world. She has also appeared as a series regular in the HBO Max series Generation, and the award-winning Netflix limited series Baby Reindeer, for which she received historic Emmy and BAFTA nominations for Best Supporting Actress and won the coveted Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Performance.
For eight years, Nava worked in the fields of healing justice and culture change with community-based service providers, student organizations, and survivors of violence. She first worked with immigrant survivors as a legal assistant, and then as a peer counselor and advocate for LGBTQ survivors of violence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nava has also been recognized with awards from PFLAG National, the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, and the Critics Choice Association.
Alejandra Márquez Abella
Alejandra Márquez Abella (San Luis Potosí, 1982) is an established Mexican writer and director in film and TV. Alejandra studied film at Centre d’Estudis Cinematogràfics de Catalunya in Barcelona. Her first feature film Semana Santa (2015) and her sophomore feature Las Niñas Bien/The Good Girls (2018) premiered at TIFF, the latter in the Platform Program. It was nominated for 14 Ariel prizes and visited several festivals around the world. She was named to Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch List in 2019.
Alejandra has written and directed for TV for more than a decade, she directed two episodes in the latest of NARCOS: MÉXICO and Sierra Madre: Prohibido Pasar (2024). El Norte Sobre El Vacío/Northern Skies Over Empty Space (2022), her third feature film, premiered at Berlinale in the Panorama Competition and won best feature film at FICM, the biggest film festival in Mexico, it was also recognized as the Best Film in the Ariel Awards ceremony and selected as the film to represent Mexico at the Goya Awards.
In 2023 she released her fourth film and debut in English, A Million Miles Away, which reached the first position on the Top 10 movies on Prime Video.The series La Liberación (2025), a project she created, directed, and produced, premiered on Prime Video. Her new collaboration with Amazon MGM Studios was recently announced, a feature film inspired by the article “How a Mennonite Farmer Became a Drug Suspect” which she will write and direct.
Rodrigo Salem
Rodrigo Salem is a seasoned media professional with over 20 years of experience across newspapers and magazines in both Brazil and international markets. He is a member of the Critics Choice Association and correspondent for Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s best-selling newspaper, in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of Desafiador do Desconhecido, an official best-seller Substack newsletter and a leading Portuguese-language publication focused on film and television.
As editor-in-chief of SET Magazine, he led the publication to commercial success with a focus on exclusive reporting and pop, cross-media storytelling, turning it into a best-seller. He is also a co-founder and former features editor of the Brazilian edition of GQ, one of the world’s most influential men’s magazines.
His career includes extensive global coverage of major film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, as well as awards seasons including the Oscars. He has reported on set visits for major productions including The Matrix trilogy, Batman Begins, The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Harry Potter, Django Unchained, and more. He has conducted in-depth interviews with leading figures in entertainment, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, Angelina Jolie, and many others.
Best US Latino Live Action Short
Luis Antonio Aldana
Luis Antonio Aldana is an award-winning Queer Chicano writer, actor, and producer, and co-founder of Cabaldana Alchemy. His most recent project as a writer, the Oscar®-qualified sci-fi short The Ballad of Tita and the Machines, premiered at Tribeca, won the Latinx Award at HollyShorts, and is now in development as a feature. As a producer, his credits span features, television, and shorts, including Cry Now, Showtime’s The Invitation, and the HBO-acquired short Acuitzeramo, which earned 21 awards, including the Imagen Award. Luis is a Film Independent Fast Track Fellow, an Outfest Screenwriting Lab Fellow, and a recipient of the Warner Bros. Discovery 150 Artist Grant and the Humanitas Prize. He was named one of ISA’s Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch. He is currently developing a sci-fi television series with Ley Line Entertainment.
Olga Segura-Gall
Olga Segura is a Film and TV producer based in Los Angeles. As a filmmaker, Segura produced The Truth About Emanuel, which premiered at Sundance 2013 in the US Dramatic Competition; The Dinner, one of the films in Competition at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival; her last film, Waiting for the Barbarians based on the book written by Nobel Prize writer J.M. Coetzee premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. She is currently co-directing a documentary about the three-time Latin Grammy winner Carla Morrison and developing an adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Dream of the Celt.
In 2025, she launched Highways Lab, a new initiative she created in collaboration with Rideback RISE (501c3), the outstanding nonprofit founded by producer Dan Lin and led by the incredible Latina executive Diana Mogollón. With support from Adobe, they’ve developed two new programs that support filmmakers, providing mentorship, industry access, and direct financial investment. The initiative awards grants to selected fellows and also has a Development Fund designed to accelerate projects.
Patricia Riggen
Patricia Riggen is recognized as one of America’s leading women directors. She seamlessly directs films and television across genres, from her latest action thriller, G20, starring Viola Davis, to her Sundance success La Misma Luna, the Sony Pictures box-office hit Miracles From Heaven, starring Jennifer Garner and Girl In Progress, featuring Eva Mendes. For The 33, the gripping drama about the Chilean miner rescue starring Antonio Banderas and Juliette Binoche, Patricia spent 30 days shooting underground in real mines. Regardless of genre, scope, or medium, she brings humanity to every character and story she tells.
Between feature films, Patricia directs pilots and episodic television for major networks and streaming platforms. Notably, she directed multiple episodes of the Emmy-winning drama Dopesick, starring Michael Keaton, as well as the action-packed first season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.
Patricia studied film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her first short film won a Student Academy Award, a Student Emmy, and a Mexican Academy Award. Her second film, a documentary about photographer Gordon Parks, won the Jury Prize at Sundance. In 2011, she directed Lemonade Mouth for Disney Channel, a beloved classic among young audiences worldwide, which earned her a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award nomination.
Originally from Mexico, Patricia is one of the few women of color to have directed top-grossing films in the past decade.
Best US Latino Animated Short Film
Rachel Richmond
Rachel Richmond is a producer with over 15 years of experience across the animation industry, spanning feature films, series, and video games. Most recently, she produced the series Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 for Netflix. Inspired by art, horror, and genre filmmaking, she strives to tell stories that challenge expectations and blur the lines between mediums.
Roy & Arturo Ambriz
Roy & Arturo Ambriz are Mexican writers, directors, and producers, and founders of Cinema Fantasma, an acclaimed stop-motion animation studio based in Mexico City. They wrote and directed the acclaimed mid-length film Revoltoso and the award-winning series Frankelda’s Book of Spooks (HBO Max, 2021). Their debut feature film, I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first stop-motion feature, has been acquired by Netflix for international distribution. They are currently in pre-production on their next feature film, Ballad of the Phoenix. They also produced the animated series Women Wearing Shoulder Pads for Adult Swim.
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