Diego Velasco

Writer/Director Diego Velasco was born in the US and raised in Venezuela. His first feature, La Hora Cero (The Zero Hour) broke all Venezuelan Box Office records and garnered 35 festival awards. The Lincoln Center's Film Comment Magazine called it "rare and special: an intelligent, finely constructed and wonderfully acted feature with a subversive message and a sting in the tail." His first US project: "Cybergeddon", was a digital crime thriller from the visionary storyteller and "CSI" creator Anthony E. Zuiker. True to its cyber nature, the film, which stars Missy Peregrym and Olivier Martinez. had a day and date release in more than twenty five countries via Yahoo! surpassing over one billion views on the internet. Velasco's next feature, The Whistler, is a thriller based on the Venezuelan legend of the same name. The script written by, Carolina Paiz (Orange is the New Black / Narcos) was selected for the 2018 Sundance Writers lab and is being produced by Dillon D Jordan (The Kindergarten Teacher / Skin) with PaperChase films. On the TV front, Velasco directed the immigration episode for the final season of the Emmy-Award-winning Orange is the New Black, an episode which The New Yorker singled out as "brilliant." He also directed for Jenji Kohan's produced Netflix comedy Teenage Bounty Hunters, and was the Producing - Director for Social Distance, Netflix's first scripted anthology written and produced remotely during the COVID 19 pandemic. Most Recently, Velasco directed an episode for the second season of the Disney+ show, Diary of a Future President, created by Ilana Peña and produced by Gina Rodriguez.