Ina Sotirova Sotirova

INA SOTIROVA is a filmmaker, TEDx speaker and media professional with 15 years of storytelling experience. She wrote, directed and edited award-winning short films freedom2dance (doc, 2012) and Agwe (animation, 2018), among others. Ina specialised in documentary filmmaking at Columbia University and won the 2012 Du-Pont / Judy F. Crichton Award for visual storytelling. Her fiction debut, Agwe, was a 2018 winner of JAFTA Propella and took second place for Best Caribbean Short at KingstOOn 2019. Ina is also an alumna of the Jamaican Film Lab and Jihlava Academy Creative Lab, and won the Investor’s Choice Award at the inaugural Kingston Creative Pitch Forward with Mango Magic, her family feature film in development. A citizen of the world born in Bulgaria, she moved to Kingston in 2015, where she also teaches and mentors inner-city youths at the UWI Community Film Project and budding filmmakers and visual artists at Edna Manley School. Ina has a keen interest and appreciation for humankind’s cultural, spiritual and artistic heritage and expression. A believer in the power of stories, she aspires to create work that can open the doors of perception and completely change the way we understand the world and our role in it.