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Chelo Alvarez-Stehle
- Location:
- Spain, United States
- Languages:
- English, French, Spanish
- Issues:
- Child Welfare, Racial Injustice, Gun Violence, Mass Incarceration & Criminal Justice Reform, Refugee Crisis and Immigration, Economic Injustice, Women and Girls, Gender violence , Human Rights
- Expertise:
- Impact Producing, Consulting, Impact Strategist/Advisor, Designing impact guides
- Cultural/racial identity:
- Hispanic, Latina, White, multirracial family
- Self identification:
- woman
Bio
Chelo Alvarez-Stehle is a Spaniard and American world reporter, author, award-winning documentary filmmaker and impact producer. In the 90s, she worked on documentaries for NHK and was Tokyo’s correspondent for Spain’s El Mundo daily. She moved to California in 1995 where she started directing/producing documentaries.
Chelo orchestrated the worldwide impact campaigns for her documentaries THROUGH THE WALL (The Guardian, LPB/PBS Digital), which has recently been instrumental in saving the historic San Diego/Tijuana Friendship Park from having Biden build the wall planned by Trump, and SANDS OF SILENCE feature documentary (PBS, The WORLD Channel, RTVE), that engaged audiences in the millions, including victims in shelters, perpetrators in prisons, bystanders, students, legislators and the general public, against gender violence and trafficking. Her films continue to screen at universities from Yale to Hiroshima; cultural centers from Sidney to Tokyo and Tijuana; Bar Associations from New York to Madrid; human, women’s and immigrant rights organizations from Shanghai to Mexicali, prisons from California to Catalonia, conferences from the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights and Brazil’s World Human Rights Forum, to Women in the World: Stories and Solutions Summit in New York, National Sexual Assault Conference in Hollywood, EEC-5th Entertainment Education Conference in New Delhi, the European Parliament and the United Nations.
Currently in Barcelona, her impact producing work focuses on gender issues, immigration, human rights and economic justice. Chelo worked as impact producer consultant for NASRIN documentary film, on the jailed Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, taking it to the European and New Zealand Parliament and to millions of Arab and Iranian households, and for STORMING CAESARS PALACE (Independent Lens 2023), on universal basic income, to bring it to the US Congress. She is starting to craft the impact strategy for PRODIGAL DAUGTHER (The Gotham 2022), on immigration, identity and healing through art, and LIGHT FALLS VERTICAL (IDFA 2022), an incursion in the mind of a domestic violence abuser. She currently works as lead impact producer for the documentary film FROM HERE (America Reframed 2023), on immigration, belonging, racism and creative activism.
Chelo was a speaker at a 2021 Movies that Matter Industry Days panel spotlighting NASRIN impact producing campaign; at the 2021 Madrid ChangeNOW International Conference Impact panel, and at the 2022 Madrid Festival de Cine por Mujeres Documentary Fundind, Distribution & Impact panel.
