From Asunción, Paraguay, Bettina Escauriza is a filmmaker, writer, artist, and actor living in Philadelphia. She is a natural storyteller from a family of frustrated mystics, spectacular liars, ill-fated thieves, and awful politicians. Her work deals with immigration, Indigenous knowledge, exile, and love. Her aim as a filmmaker is to tell stories about Indigenous people and people of color that are lush, sensual, thrilling, and complex — whose desire is to tell the truth about the communities she comes from by centering narratives of joy, defiance, and resistance in the face of oppression.

Bettina does international human rights work at the United Nations, focusing specifically on the role of Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous knowledge in mitigating the climate crisis. Bettina is the Community News Producer at PhillyCAM and a film instructor for Philadelphia youth at Big Picture Alliance.

Bettina is a Sundance Knight Foundation Fellow, a Flaherty Seminar Fellow, a BlackStar Film Festival Philadelphia Filmmaker Fellow, an Almanack Screenwriters October Fellow, an Open Immersion Virtual Reality Creative Development Lab Fellow, a Research and Curatorial Fellow at Slought (UPenn), and an IEar Fellow (RPI).