Juan Diaz Bohorquez, Juan Diaz Bohorquez is an award-winning director, writer, and visual artist, working on subjects such as colonialism, new heroines, technoshamanism and indigenous mythologies, merging intimate documentation and research with fictional and metaphysical elements. His practice is driven by a non-linear, multi-disciplinary approach, to create intimate narratives that emerge from holistic worlds. He is he is developing and creating film, episodic and XR projects in Europe and America.
Recently her worked with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, as art director, concept designer and vfx supervisor for his new film “Memoria” winner of the Jury Award in Cannes 2021, he was commissioned by MIT to conceive and direct the XR-AI “Riddler’s Garden” in 2022 and won a prestigious France CNC writing grant for his XR project "Terra." He is preparing of his elevated horror feature film “Ride the Darkness”, that combines a family story of women of 4 generations and the darknest manifestations of trauma.
Juan was transmedia and worldbuilding designer and producer of "We are the Heat," a new urban beat film premiering at the Warsaw International Film Festival 2018. He was invited to the Berlinale Talents 2007 and won the Berlin Today Award 2009 production grant for his film “By Night”, a love story between dimensions he wrote and directed, that premiered in 2010 at Berlinale and Fantastic Fest. In 2008 Juan wrote and production designed “RojoRed”, a mix technic short film screened in more than a 100 festivals and winner of multiple awards. His most recent short-film ›Way‹ , a journey about memory and family bonds, is currently in postproduction.
Diaz Bohorquez is the European Director of the World Building Institute, a non profit research unit and transdisciplinary network. In parallel to his artistic practice, for more than two decades, Juan has pioneered the research and development of innovative narrative design and world-building methodologies alongside acclaimed production designer Alex McDowell ("Fight Club," "Minority Report”), director of the WBI in Los Angeles. Their method combines deep research with poetic evocation, to create intimate narratives that emerge from holistic worlds, that has been applied to develop and produce films, entertainment projects, social impact projects and science-art collaboration projects.
In 2018 he was invited by the UNDP to the Future of Cities Summit in Venice, to rethink Cities through world building and narrative and is building up a collaboration with them to develop narrative project in different cities. He is also part of the Guild of Future Architects. As part of the Guild he was mentor to teams in Lima and the Netherlands for the Rockefeller Foundation Food Systems Vision Prize.
Since 2009 has co-curated the World building and Production Design Studio, a joint effort between WBI and the Berlinale Talents of the Berlin International film festival. Along the 10 editions at Berlinale they have worked on different pressing subjects including: Water Stories (2015) around the water crisis, Migratory Narratives (2016), on migration and settlements, Surveillance and Spectacle (2017) investigating the balance of power in a surveillance state and most recently Narratives of Control (2020). He has been invited as speaker and mentor at FMX, the VRSci fest, the EAVE program, the Animation Workshop, the ESCAC among others.
During the 2020 quarantine Juan co-created, conceptualised and designed Decameron Row, an experiment in community inspired by Boccaccio, inviting 100 artist from around the world to contribute video pieces, hosted in a virtual neighbourhood. feature in the New York Times and Deutschlandfunkkultur. www.decameronrow.com
Juan's photographic work earned him the prestigious Fernando Botero Jury Prize, and has exhibited in Berlin, Boston, Bogota, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Barcelona.
Other recognitions include: a Cannes Golden Lions, D&AD Awards, Yellow Pencil and Silver Clio Awards, for his illustration work and was included twice in the Lürzer’s Archive 200 Best illustrators worldwide.
Juan is based in Berlin.