Vanesa Moreno is a Bolivian-American filmmaker and photographer whose work reflects a deep connection to analog film and international cinema. She is a member at FREE THE WORK and a member of American Bolivian Collective, Women of Color Unite (WOCU), Chicana Director’s Initiative (CDI), as well as Sporas, a cinematographer collective. She has screened her past works at film festivals like NFFTY, Film Shortage, The Bush Films, Tokyo Shorts and more. Holding her bachelor’s degree from VCUArts, she was also a fellow of the Handy Foundation DIT program as well as a mentee for Women of Color Unite. She was a semi-finalist for the Spotlight Dorado McDonald’s sponsorship program for her screenplay “Originality is Dead”.
After graduating from VCUarts Cinema with her BA in Cinema and minor in Business in 2021, she entered the independent filmmaker life by moving to Los Angeles and pursuing freelance film production work in the camera department. She is currently a full-time freelancer and formerly a prep tech at Old Fast Glass, a camera rental house in the Valley. Inspired by film preservation, especially Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema project, she seeks to preserve the magic of Super 8 and Super 16mm film. Shooting her own film photography since she was 15, she will fight day and night to keep the film medium alive for as long as she lives.
Vanesa is a filmmaker exploring identity, obsession, and transformation through a poetic and emotionally grounded lens. Rooted in visual storytelling and minimalism, their work examines the inner lives of young women navigating complex emotional and cultural terrain. Drawing inspiration from films like 3 Women, Amores Perros, and Columbus, Vanesa builds atmospheric narratives that blur the line between realism and lyrical introspection.
Their current work includes FAN GIRL, a coming-of-age story about a queer teenager whose obsession with her favorite musician becomes a pathway to self-discovery, and ORIGINALITY IS DEAD, a critique of ambition and authorship in the fashion world centered on an Indigenous-Latina creative. Across projects, Vanesa brings care, curiosity, and an eye for the intimate to stories about identity, desire, and the pressures of performance.
Vanesa is based in Los Angeles and is currently developing both short- and long-form projects in narrative and hybrid spaces.