Gabriela Ortega is an award-winning writer/director and actor from the Dominican Republic. She is a USC graduate, a 2023 Sundance screenwriting fellow, a 2022 Sundance interdisciplinary fellow, and a 2022-2023 Academy of Motion Pictures 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 LALIFF and  “Best New Filmmaker'' at the annual NFMLA awards.

Her latest film, Beautiful, FL produced through the Disney launchpad program, will premiere on Disney+ in 2023, and her first film, “PAPI'' is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max.

She is developing a VR experience with Indeed and Hillman Grad, exploring recidivism and re-entry after incarceration in the U.S., 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 TV 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.