Juana Pelos

Maria Mealla
Director/Screenwriter

Maria Mealla was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia,on a healthy balance of cultural folklore and Catholic superstition. She later moved to Austin, Texas, where she studied Theater Arts before landing in the Bay Area, where she taught herself filmmaking through work-trade.

Her short film, LA MACANA, won HBO’s 2023 Pa’lante Filmmaker Competition. BODY SHOP, her latest project in development, was selected to participate in the 2023 Tribeca Untold Stories competition and the 2024 NALIP Latino Media Market Accelerator. She is a Latino Public Broadcasting grantee for her short JUANA PELOS, which has screened at festivals across the country including Austin Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Florida Film Festival. In 2025 Maria was selected as one of three fellows for COLECTIVO, an inaugural Latinx filmmaker initiative created by Tribeca in partnership with the Miranda Family Fund to bring to life Las Hijas de Rosalía, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Most recently, Maria was selected as an Austin Film Institute grantee to create a proof of concept for Body Shop, which will go into production fall of 2026.

Maria strives to bring more films from a Latinx perspective to the big screen.

Daniel Fabelo
Producer

Daniel is a Latino filmmaker originally from Austin, Texas. He graduated with a degree in Film from the University of Texas at Austin and, for a time, he was a writer/director for online powerhouse, Rooster Teeth. There, he directed numerous web series, documentaries and the sci-fi feature, Lazer Team 2, now available on Tubi. His latest short film, “El Gato Feo,” premiered at the Dallas Intl. Film Festival and has gone on to play over a dozen festivals around the world. Most recently, he was accepted into the New Orleans Film Society’s Southern Producers Lab with the short film, “Juana Pelos,” which he produced and is currently in post-production.