Alejandra Vasquez is a Mexican-American filmmaker raised in between rural Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her directorial feature-length debut, Going Varsity in Mariachi—co-directed with Sam Osborn—premiered at Sundance 2023, won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition, and is now on Netflix.

Her short films include Folk Frontera, also co-directed with Sam, a surrealist film about the exchange of culture and music in the borderlands of Far West Texas, which had a broadcast premiere in the PBS special The Latino Experience, won the SXSW Jury Award for Texas Short, and is taught in San Diego public schools; and Baca about the Chicana muralist Judy Baca which was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts (LACMA) and acquired by LA Times Short Docs.

Her latest short about the boom-and-bust oil cycles in her rural Texas hometown, When It’s Good, It’s Good, a co-production with Latino Public Broadcasting, was released on POV Shorts and is streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Alejandra began her career as a producer at Hard Working Movies, working alongside Lori Cheatle. She contributed to the acclaimed documentaries Matangi/Maya/M.IA. (2018), Us Kids (2020), and most recently co-produced Nanfu Wang’s HBO Original Documentary Night Is Not Eternal (2024). Additional producing credits including Tracy Droz Tragos’s Plan C (2023), and the two Topic series “Night Shift” and “Eating.”

Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, SFFILM, ITVS, Pop-Up Magazine, and the International Women’s Media Foundation. Fellowships and residencies include the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, Film Independent Docuseries Intensive, IF/Then South Shorts, and the Catapult Research Program.

Previously, ran TED’s nonfiction book imprint TED Books and produced radio at NPR.

Now based in Los Angeles, Alejandra and Sam founded Masa Films where they are developing projects across documentary and fiction. She is currently writing her first feature script HALF ORANGE with support from the SFFILM Rainin Grant.

REPRESENTATION | WME

Hayley Hashemi

Maggie Pisacane

DIRECT

alejandra@masa.film