Gabriela Ortega is an award-winning writer/director and actor from the Dominican Republic. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California (USC), a 2023 Sundance screenwriting fellow, a 2022 Sundance interdisciplinary fellow, and a 2022-2023 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fellow. Her short film Huella, produced through the inaugural class of Indeed and Hillman Grad’s “Rising Voices” fellowship, was an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is being turned into a feature film after being selected for the 2022 Sundance Producers Lab and the 2023 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. Most recently, Gabriela was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. She won the NBC & Telemundo Best Director Award at the 2022 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF) and Best New Filmmaker at the annual NewFilmmakers Los Angeles (NFMLA) awards. Her latest short film, Beautiful, FL, produced through the Disney Launchpad program, will premiere on Disney+ in 2023, and her first short film, Papi, is available to stream on HBO Max. She is developing a virtual reality experience with Indeed and Hillman Grad, exploring recidivism and re-entry after incarceration in the United States, and writing for the new BioShock 4 game. Gabriela is also penning an original one-woman show titled Passenger, to be produced in Los Angeles later this year, which will be adapted into a television series. Her work lives within the intersection of fiction and poetry and aims to draw cultural bridges that lead to the Caribbean through intersectionality, duality and ancestral memory.

Huella — When her grandmother’s death in the Dominican Republic unleashes a generational curse, Daniela, a restless flamenco dancer living in New York City, must confront her family’s dark past as she fights for one last chance at professional dancing.