Iliana Sosa

Iliana Sosa (2020)is a documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker that divides her time between El Paso and Austin, Texas. She was born and raised in El Paso by Mexican immigrant parents. A former Bill Gates Millennium Scholar, she holds a Master of Fine Arts in film production and directing from UCLA. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Steven Bochco Fellowship, the Hollywood Foreign Press Award, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Fellowship and the National Hispanic Foundation of the Arts Scholarship, among others. Her thesis film for her master’s, “Child of the Desert,” won Best Short Film and the Texas Award at the Oscar-qualifying 2012 USA Film Festival. She was a 2013 Film Independent Project Involve Directing Fellow and was selected for the 2013 TransAtlantic Talent Lab in Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2014, she was selected for the Sundance-sponsored Latino Screenwriting Project with her script “Paper Birds Learn to Fly.” Iliana has directed short documentaries, fiction shorts and a narrative fiction feature, “Detained in the Desert,” which had its world premiere at the 2012 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. In 2017, Firelight Media awarded her an Impact Producer Fellowship. In 2018, she was selected as a Berlinale Talent and most recently co-directed a short documentary, “An Uncertain Future,” with Chelsea Hernandez. The short has screened at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival and won a Jury Award for Best Texas Short. It has also screened at the 2018 Aspen ShortsFest where it won the Youth Jury Award. She is a 2018-2019 Sundance Development Fellow.

As a Logan fellow, she will work on her first feature documentary, “What We Leave Behind,” which explores how immigration, intergenerational trauma, class and citizenship has impacted her family.