Denice Salinas

Denice Salinas was born in Oxnard, California, to Alan Glad and Roberta Atkins. After her parents divorced, she lived with her mother and two brothers in Pleasanton, California for around 3 years. She then moved to Dublin, California at the age of 6, where she lived for approximately 25 years. As a child, Denice was inspired to become a filmmaker, having watched a lot of television and acting out scenes from one her favorite show "Batman and Robin". She was always the director, setting the stage for how the scenes were to play out. She also made the costumes from scratch out of home materials. Due to problems with her life and a long struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, she became sidetracked and fell out of touch with her filmmaking ambitions. After finally overcoming her problems and became sober, she got married at the age of 25 to Jeffrey Salinas and had a daughter a year later. She and Jeffrey divorced 7 years later. Shortly after, she finally decided to further her schooling and got her AA degree in Psychology at Mendocino College in Ukiah, California. She graduated with honors in 2005. After which, she wrote 2 novels, one that was self-published, and also wrote 6 songs, all of which had been produced by a professional demo producer in 2010. She then moved to Santa Monica in the Summer of 2010. She was practically homeless, with little money, and only a car to live in, so she decided to enroll in The Art Institute of California-Santa Monica, where she studied filmmaking. She struggled, but she graduated in 2012 with an AS degree with honors, having learned all the basics in filmmaking and then some. After a short break, she decided to go back to school at The Art Institute of Tennessee, Nashville to get her BFA degree. Since being there, she has been involved with the 54 hour film festival and worked hard to get her debut documentary short film voted to be one of the school's best films of the year. After obtaining such an honor, she decided it was time to take things a step further, so she took all her experience as a filmmaker and produced, directed, and wrote a narrative short film, which she had entered into the 2015 Sundance and Nashville Film Festival.