Amada Torruella
Amada Torruella is a Salvadoran artist, filmmaker, and film programmer raised in El Salvador and Canada, and based between El Salvador and California. Amada’s work centers joy and tenderness in the mundane, as well as the stories of women and their care for their environment, each other, and their communities. Amada is passionate about exploring memory, grief, Central American landscapes and the relationship between people and home.
In 2023 their short documentary, la isla, about mass detentions in El Salvador premiered with The New Yorker. Amada’s work has also been featured at Blackstar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival and the San Diego Latino Film Festival. Amada co-founded ZOLAS, a multidisciplinary cultural studio based in San Salvador, run by women artists. She is a 2021 JustFilms Ford Foundation/Rockwood Institute Fellow and a Voices of Our Nations Art (VONA) Fellow.
Since 2014, Amada has worked as a Film Programmer and has programmed at Indie Grits, New Orleans Film Festival, SFFILM Film Festival And Wildscreen. Amada is fluent in Spanish, English and French; currently, Amada works as youth media educator at Media Arts Center San Diego.
Seth Gadsden is an artist and educator raised on a small farm in Clover, SC and currently based in San Diego, CA. He practices intimate, observational cinematography and experimental approaches to storytelling. Having worked extensively in the nonprofit sector to support independent filmmakers, Seth’s artistic approach is deeply collaborative and invested in fostering community, sustainability, and supporting emerging makers.
Seth’s cinematography and producing work has been featured on MSNBC, PBS, Topic, The New Yorker, and film festivals such as Big Sky, New Orleans Film Festival, BlackStar, AFI Fest, Sidewalk, amongst others. Recent documentary work includes INVISIBLE HANDS (2019), IN THE BUBBLE WITH JAMIE (2022) and the feature documentary MELTDOWN IN DIXIE (2021), which won Best Short Documentary at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, AmDocs Film Festival, and Ashland Film Festival.
Over the years, Seth has managed a wide range of projects including film festivals, community storytelling labs, site-specific public artworks and countless educational initiatives. In 2007-09, Seth spent two years traveling with an artist collective across North America documenting and developing community-based projects while living in a converted, vegetable-oil-powered city transit bus. Currently, Seth manages the media education programs at Media Arts Center San Diego.