Violeta Ayala

Runs koa.xyz with Dan Fallshaw.

I'm Violeta Ayala, filmmaker, artist, technologist and AI innovator, and the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. My work moves between cinema, code and resistance. I build worlds where storytelling, technology and Indigenous futurism meet, imagining film as something alive, a system that listens, reacts and evolves. My VR animation Prison X premiered at Sundance and Cannes before travelling through festivals and museums around the world. My documentaries La Lucha, Cocaine Prison, The Fight, The Bolivian Case and Stolen have been broadcast on PBS, Amazon Prime, Netflix and The Guardian, earning more than 50 international awards, including a Walkley.

In 2021 my world KOA.XYZ received an honourable mention in the Indigenous Futurism Model-Making Competition of the Indigenous Scholars of Architecture, Planning and Design. In 2023 La Lucha premiered at BlackStar and SXSW Sydney, and in 2024 it won the NYWIFT Award for Excellence in Directing at the ReelAbilities Film Festival in New York. In 2023 Woven Worlds received the special recognition for XR innovation at the XR Brain Jam of Games for Change in New York. My XR works Las Awichas, Huk the Jaguaress and Woven Worlds have been exhibited in London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and Guangzhou.

In 2024, at Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, I developed Huk the Jaguaress, a multimodal experience where robotic vision, large language models, sculpture and projection mapping come together in real time. That year I was selected as a Salzburg Global Fellow, for Creating Futures: Art and AI for Tomorrow's Narratives. In 2025 I co-led FAIR FUTURE: Feminist AI at the University of Nottingham, designing workshops and hack jams about collective intelligence and care. I presented Todo Nace Desde Lo Pequeño at Festival Ollantay, at El Martadero in Cochabamba, a live experiment where dancers, generative imagery and spectators co-created the story together.

Right now I'm expanding Huk at Mila and Abundant Intelligences, building a collective intelligence model at the intersection of Indigenous AI, dance, affective computing and ecology. As the first Mozilla Fellow from Bolivia, I'm building an embodied intelligence trained locally, on our own computers and our own energy, for community data sovereignty and Indigenous dance ch'ixied with breaking. I direct sala.red, Red de Información Tecnológica, investigating Bolivia's technological infrastructure, economy, critical minerals, media ownership and Indigenous data rights. I'm the co-founder of United Notions Film.

Write to v@unf.red

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