Giselle Bonilla

Giselle Bonilla received her MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory in 2023, and is a recipient of the AUDI Fellowship for Women which sponsors one promising female director with a full-tuition scholarship for the program. Her AFI thesis film, THE BULLFIGHTER, won the 2023 Student DGA Grand Prize Award and received Special Mention for Best Comedy at the 2024 Palm Springs International Short Film Festival.

Giselle is a 2024 Latino Film Institute x Netflix Inclusion Fellow, a 2023 Telluride FilmLAB Fellow, a 2021 Deutsche Bank Frieze Filmmaking Fellow, and an alum of the Sundance Institute as a 2020 Ignite x Adobe Fellow. She received her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her undergrad thesis film VIRGENCITA received the Horizon Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Currently, she is in pre-production on her first feature: THE MUSICAL, a dark comedy about a jilted middle school theatre teacher who exacts revenge the only way he knows how. The proof of concept short for THE MUSICAL received the Audience Award at the American Cinematheque's 2024 Proof Film Festival and received Special Mention from the jury.