Valeria Sarmiento

Chilean writer-director and editor who studied philosophy and filmmaking at the University of Chile in the 1960s. Based in Paris since 1974, her documentaries and feature films tend to address Latin American gender politics but she is probably best known as the regular editor and collaborator of her late husband Raoul Ruiz (1941-2011) with whom she shared the Chilean Art Critics Circle's Bicentennial Award for cinema in 2010. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988 and is often cited alongside Angelina Vázquez and Marilú Mallet as a key woman filmmaker of Chilean exile. A retrospective of her work as director was held at Stanford University in May 2008.