Juan Paulo Laserna is an award-winning Colombian screenwriter, director and producer whose stories often utilize magical realism and dark humor to develop contemporary dramas and crime narratives related to immigration. He received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he directed his first feature film, Las Malas Lenguas, which screened at several festivals, had a strong theatrical run in Colombia and was later acquired by STARZ. He attained an M.F.A. in Film Directing and TV Writing at Columbia University in New York City, where he was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Screenplay Competition Award for his story Wuasikamas, as well as the Katharina Otto Bernstein Mentorship Prize for his thesis short film, Not My Name. He is a NALIP Emerging Content Scholar, a Film Independent Screenwriting Fellow and a recipient of the Focus Features Award for Social and Cultural Impact. He recently worked as director’s assistant on the Netflix series One Hundred Years of Solitude and is currently in development of his feature film Not My Name, which has gained the support of the Film Independent Producing Lab and the Producers Guild of America Create Lab.

Not My Name — 1996. As Colombia descends into bloody insurgent warfare, a family must travel on a perilous road to visit their ailing grandfather. Their fear of kidnapping forces them to rely on their youngest child to conceal their fake identities, exposing him to the reality of war.