About Laura Varela
Director, San Antonio Film Makers
Laura Varela is a San Antonio-based media artist, activist and educator originally from the U.S./Mexico border town of El Paso, Texas. Her projects are community-based and focus on issues of social justice and cultural preservation. She is a recipient of the Humanities Texas Media Arts grant for her current project As Long as I Remember: American Veteranos, which examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in the Chicano community from the point of view of artists. This project was also selected for funding by Latino Public Broadcasting (part of the CPB Minority Consortia) and is currently in post-production with an intended PBS broadcast in 2008. She is currently developing raúlrsalinas and the Poetry of Liberation, a feature documentary about the life and times of Xicano poet and activist raúlrsalinas.
In 2005, along with Guillermina Zabala, Varela produced Pan de Vida / Bread of Life, which features the spiritual and artistic interpretation of Day of the Dead by women artists in San Antonio. In 2004, along with Anne Lewis and Heather Courtney, she produced Texas Majority Minority for the Voting in America Project. In 2002, A Slight Discomfort: Echoes from the Clinic (for which Varela was Associate Producer) won the Premio Mesquite Award for Best Experimental Work at the San Antonio CineFestival, and most recently screened at the Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York as part of the Women of Color Film Festival. Other projects include Stories of Immigrant Survivors of Abuse: Remedies Under VAWA (Associate Producer), Teatro Humanidad (Producer), and Liteweight (Producer, 30 min. 16mm).
In San Antonio, her installation work has been exhibited by the Blue Star Art Space, The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Gallista Gallery, and the UTSA Downtown Art Gallery. She is an alumnus of the 2006 CPB/PBS Producers Academy, the 2006 NALAC Leadership Institute, and the 2003 NALIP/UCLA Latino Producers Academy. She attended the Sundance Filmmaker’s lab in 1997 and in 1993 received her BA from the University of Texas in Radio TV and Film. Her youth work in San Antonio includes organizations like the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and KLRN. She is currently Director of Programming for the San Antonio Chapter of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and has just completed her second year as a Media Arts Panelist for the Texas Commission on the Arts.