Andres Torres Vives was born in Chile, raised in New York, and completed his MFA in Film Directing/Producing at UCLA. Within the past two years he has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Filmmaking, a prestigious Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Motion Picture Association of America Award in directing (MPAA), three scholarships from the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, a McNamara Foundation grant and the Jack Nicholson Distinguished Prize in Directing. His films have played at various film festivals, including this year’s HBO/New York International Latino Film Festival, the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival and were broadcast on KCET-LA’s Fine Cut Series. Torres-Vives has also produced projects in Mexico, Burma, Bolivia and the U.S./Mexico border region, as well as radio reports for Public Radio International (PRI) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Prior to engaging in filmmaking full-time, Torres-Vives was the executive director of an arts non-profit and a working visual artist whose work received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the California Arts Council, along with multiple private foundations and corporations. He has worked extensively on immigrant, refugee and LGBT issues, and teaches film directing and production at UCLA Extension and to incarcerated youth through a private foundation.