Juan Mejia Botero

Juan Mejia Botero is an award-winning film director with over 15 years of experience in feature documentaries. His work has focused primarily on human rights abuses and struggles for social justice around the world. He has worked extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean where he has directed a number of films on forced displacement, ethnic autonomy, state violence, and the competition for natural resources, which have played widely in the festival circuit and also television.

Juan’s directorial debut, UPROOTED (2008), won the San Francisco Latino Film Festival Audience Choice Award and the Best Documentary Award at the COMMFEST Film Festival. It aired nationally on PBS. His feature documentary THE BATTLE FOR LAND, was a winner of a production grant from the Colombian Ministry of Culture, a post-production grant from the Tribeca Film Institute, and the 2016 Honesty Oscar for Best Picture by the Accountability Lab and the ONE Foundation. Juan’s most recent documentary, DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS, shot along the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, premiered at the HotDocs Film Festival in Toronto, won the Audience Award at DocNYC and the Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival. It was also named Best in Festival at the Environmental Film Festival at Yale and the Princeton Environmental Film Festival. It premiered on national television in 2017.