Julia Solomonoff

Early work and short films

Solomonoff began directing short films in the 1990s. Her early works include Octavo 51 (1992), Un día con Ángela (1993), and Siesta (1998). Her short film Scratch (2003) screened at New Directors/New Films and received the Milos Forman Award.^[2]

Feature films

Solomonoff's first feature film, Sisters (Spanish: Hermanas), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2005. The film was developed through the Sundance Writers Lab and the Berlinale Talent Campus.^[1] The film was also Pedro Pascal's feature film debut. For Pascal's role, Solomonoff was looking for candidates with strong English-language skills. In addition to meeting this requirement, Pascal (then credited as Balmaceda) was found to be "someone with a very special face, very photogenic, with a kind of mystery" by Solomonoff.

Her second feature, The Last Summer of La Boyita (Spanish: El último verano de la Boyita), premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2009. The film was produced by Pedro Almodóvar's company El Deseo and won more than twenty international awards.^[1] It is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.^[1]

In 2017, Solomonoff wrote and directed Nobody's Watching (Spanish: Nadie nos mira), starring Guillermo Pfening. Pfening won Best Actor at the Tribeca Festival for his performance in the film.^[5] The film opened theatrically at Film Forum in New York and was a New York Times and Village Voice Critics' Pick.^[6]

Television and documentary work

Solomonoff's television and documentary work includes The Suitor (2001), which aired on PBS, Chinchonfan (2003), Paraná, Biography of a River (2011), and Aerocene Pacha: A Sustainable Utopia (2020).^[2] Aerocene Pacha: A Sustainable Utopia was presented by the Goethe-Institut's Science Film Festival and credited Solomonoff as director.^[7]

She also directed work for the television series 15 a la Hora, also titled Minimum Wage, a Paramount Global Content series about three Latina immigrant cleaners working in Los Angeles.^[8]

Producing

As a producer, co-producer, associate producer, or executive producer, Solomonoff has worked on films including Cocalero, Everybody Has a Plan, The Third Bank of the River, A memória que me contam, Zama, Pendular, and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer.^[2][1] Her producing credits include projects that screened at Sundance, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and the New York Film Festival.^[2]

Teaching

Solomonoff has taught film directing at the graduate level and has held faculty and leadership positions at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. In 2021, NYU Tisch announced that she would become Chair of the Graduate Film Department, effective in the Fall 2021 semester.^[3] She is currently Head of Directing in the Graduate Film Program at Tisch.^[4]

Before returning to NYU, Solomonoff was a distinguished lecturer and head of the Directing Program at Brooklyn College's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.^[9]

As director and writer

As producer