Tamara Shogaolu is an Emmy-nominated and award-winning director, writer, artist, and creative technologist whose innovative approach to storytelling has been lauded by Forbes, The Guardian, and Vogue, naming her a visionary in the field.
As the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures, Shogaolu is the first Black Latina woman to head a leading studio specializing in film, animation, and technology. With an emphasis on storytelling that uplifts historically marginalized voices, her dynamic work has shown at top festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide including the MoMA in New York, Tribeca Film Festival, the National Gallery of Indonesia, and others. In addition, Shogaolu has written for Sony Pictures Animations and partnered on projects with the Sundance Institute, Netflix, PBS, Frontline, and the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF).
A creative force on the rise, Shogaolu won the 2022 SXSW Innovation Award for Visual Media and the Best Digital Storytelling Award at IDFA 2021. She was also nominated for a Gouden Kalf Award, the top film prize in the Netherlands (2019, 2022).
Shogaolu holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she was a Burton Lewis Endowed Scholar for Directing. Currently, she is a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Open Documentary Lab and an inaugural Motion Picture Academy Accelerator Fellow; she was also an Academy Nicholls Fellowship semi-finalist, a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, and a Luce Scholar in Indonesia.
While at OpenDocLab, Tamara is working on 40-acres, a re-imagining of quilting as a form of storytelling.