Profiles: Patricia Cardoso | Proimágenes Colombia

Director, writer, and producer of film and television, winner of an Student Academy Award in 1996 for The Water Carrier (El reino de los cielos) and the Sundance Audience Award for Real Women Have Curves (Las mujeres de verdad tienen curvas). In 2017, she became one of the few Colombians to be among the 774 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, responsible for the organization of the Oscar Awards. She also belongs to the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Born in Bogota, she studied anthropology at the University of the Andes and holds a masters in fine arts from the University of California. In the United States, she has worked with HBO, Universal, Disney, Lifetime, Hallmark, Wigs, Film Independent, Sony, and others.
 
Her films have been successful at the box office, earning high ratings and the approval of critics. Her filmography is made up of the feature film El paseo de Teresa (2017), the short film La Clave (2016), the television feature film Meddling Mom (2013), the YouTube web series Ro (2012), the short film Deep Blue Breath (2011), the television feature film Lies in Plain Sight (2010), the feature films Real Women Have Curves (2002) and The Water Carrier (1996), and the short film The Air Globes (1991) .
 
In addition to the Oscar she received for The Water Carrier, she has received two awards from the Directors Guild of America and her films have been presented at various festivals around the world. She also received the Smithsonian Institute Award in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to highlighting, preserving, and promoting Latin culture and heritage in the United States.
 
Cardoso was invited to the Sundance Institute’s Directors and Screenwriters Labs in 2000 to develop her feature film screenplay Milky Way Dreamland. She worked at Sundance for five years, starting from the bottom winding up as director of the Latin American program. She was also a research assistant to Oscar-winning documentarians Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock.

In recent years she has become a professor of film direction and screenwriting at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, direction and production at UCLA, and anthropology at the Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. Cardoso is the author of the short novel Big Blue Bus, with which she won the Santa Monica Bus contest.
 
"Actually, what has opened doors for me are my films. Of course the award helped, but notice that my first film, The Air Globes (1991), is what got my name out. I worked at Sundance then and did not have time to shoot movies, but as a result of the Oscar, several production companies sought me out,” she said to the newspaper El Tiempo in 2012.
 
December 2017