Samantha Aldana is an award-winning, Belizean-American director and writer based in Los Angeles. She has been drawn to tell stories containing magic and otherworldliness since she started putting her stories on screen when she was 12 years old. Her work is heavily influenced by the storytelling traditions of her multicultural upbringing in the American South and the Caribbean.

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Her first feature film, Shapeless, was selected as a 2020 fellow of the IFP Narrative Lab. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2021 and will release in theaters on February 10, 2022, by XYZ Films.

 

In 2018 she was the recipient of the Belize Film Commissioner’s Emerging Storyteller Feature Film Award for her in-development feature Little Lying Wild. The film was also selected to participate in the Tribeca Film Institute Network and the Emerging Voices Program at the New Orleans Film Fest. Most recently, Little Lying Wild was 1 of 10 projects that were selected for Tribeca's Writing in Unreal Lab in fall of 2021. 

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Her short film The Melancholy Man screened at Comic Con, premiered as a top pick on The Film Shortage, and was awarded Best Narrative Film in the Audience Awards Women's Film Challenge. She received the Best Director Award for her short film These Wild Things at the NYC Damn! Film Series, and the Jury Award for Best LA Short Film at the New Orleans Film Festival. Her short Si was featured on PBS and was awarded Best Short Film and Best Cinematography at the International KIDS FIRST! Film Festival. Her film Porcelain won the Jury Award at the Boston Independent Film Festival.

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Samantha holds a BA in Film Directing from Columbia College Chicago and is a member of Film Fatales, Free the Work, WIFT and NALIP.