Leiqui del Carmen Uriana, is Wayuu of the Sijono clan, and is considered the first Indigenous woman filmmaker from Colombia and Venezuela.

Leiqui Uriana

Leiqui is a graduate in documentary filmmaking of the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños, (EICTV), Cuba, and has extensive experience in audiovisual production and production.

Over the course of her career she has prioritised training for other Indigenous directors, participating in the Wayuu Media School “Jayariyu Farías Montiel” and promoting the first Indigenous Cinema Training Lab in Colombia, the “WayuuLab”, which took place in Wayuu territory in 2019. She was part of the curatorial team for the 59th and 60th Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI) where she organised a Showcase of Indigenous Cinema Indigenous Film Showcase. She is General Director of the Wayuu Cinema and Video Showcase and is also co-founder of the International Indigenous Film Showcase of Venezuela (MICIV).


Filmography

Leiqui Uriana has directed documentaries such as El cedrón, made in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba, and her degree film Asuntos indígenas. She also participated as filmmaker in the documentary series Ser un ser humano (To Be A Human) (2011), produced by the EICTV with the support of six film schools from around the world, […]

“La memoria de la avispa”

As Wayuu women we are conscious about the responsibility concerning the continuity of our Wayuu lineage. We have accepted the traditional confinement through which we are initiated and which brings us closer to the traditions connected to our fundamental roles in our culture. This confinement signals our transition from childhood to adolescence as it takes […]

Who is Zoilita?

My great aunt Zoilita, the last of 12 siblings, is a brown-skinned and curly-haired Wayuu woman of the Sijono clan. She arrived in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in the midst of the oil boom in the 1970s. A beautiful woman who, along with several cousins, organized cultural performances of Yonna (Wayuu traditional dance) for different events across […]