Ajla Hodzic

Born to Enisa and Senad Hodzic in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ajla displayed a gift for performance almost immediately. Embracing both dance and acting at a very young age, she was already a veteran of stage and screen by the age of twelve. Regularly seen in a variety of television commercials in addition to a leading role in Bosnia's popular Kabaret and hosting duties for Samo Za Djecu (Kids Only) and Novogodisnja Emisija (the nationally televised New Year's special), her star was already well on the rise when the Serbian attack on Sarajevo made any acting career there virtually impossible. During the siege of Sarajevo, Ajla and her mother fled to Izmir, Turkey. Upon receiving a scholarship from the Green Meadow Waldorf School in Chestnut Ridge, New York, Ajla returned home briefly before moving to the United States to begin her stateside education, which she continued in a post-graduate year at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. Her consistently strong academic performance in spite of being uprooted by the war drew the attention of many of America's top flight universities, and she accepted a full academic scholarship to Wellesley College, where she graduated with degrees in Cinema and Media Studies and Sculpture. After graduation, Ajla worked as an assistant director on the award winning Bosnian films Gori Vatra (Fuse) and Summer in the Golden Valley, directed by Pjer Zalica and Srdjan Vuletic. Drawn again to acting by her experience on set, Ajla arrived in Los Angeles to begin her career again stateside. She quickly booked a role in the Judd Apatow-produced comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). She also stars alongside Turkish actresses Nehir Erdogan and 'Nilufer Acikalin' in the hotly anticipated US-Turkish co-production Broken Angel (2008). Ajla speaks Bosnian, English, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish. She's an avid fan of Jorge Luis Borges, the films of Godard, Antonioni, Wong Kar Vai and David Lynch, and the number three. Conversely, she hates butterflies.