Giselle Bonilla

Giselle Bonilla received her MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory. Her thesis film, The Bullfighter, won the Student Director's Guild of America Grand Prize Award, AFI's Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award, and received Special Mention for Best Comedy at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival. Giselle is a Latino Film Institute x Netflix Inclusion Fellow, Telluride FilmLAB Fellow, and an alum of the Sundance Institute as an Ignite x Adobe Fellow. She received her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her undergrad thesis film, Virgencita, received the Horizon Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Her film, The Musical, is in U.S. Dramatic Competition and is based on a short of the same title she and her crew made while at AFI. The short won the Audience Award at the American Cinematheque's 2024 Proof Film Festival and received Special Mention from the jury. The feature is Executive Produced by her mentors: director Jonathan Levine and producer Gillian Bohrer. The Musical stars Tony Award winner Will Brill, Gillian Jacobs, and is produced by and stars Rob Lowe.