Tamara Shogaolu

Tamara Shogaolu is an Emmy Award-winning, Peabody-nominated director, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and creative technologist whose work operates at the intersection of cinematic storytelling and technological experimentation. Shogaolu is recognized in film and emerging media for crafting stories that are intimate and human-centered.

As the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures, Shogaolu is the first Black Latinx woman to lead a major studio focused on animation and technology. At Ado Ato Pictures, she utilizes advanced technology to create stories that challenge current realities and envision new futures through film, animation, television, and immersive technologies. Her expertise spans animation, documentary, film, and technology, enabling her to develop interactive narratives and immersive worlds.

Shogaolu has written for Sony Pictures Animation and collaborated on projects with organizations including the Sundance Institute, Netflix, PBS, Frontline, and the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. Her work incorporates a range of mediums, such as virtual reality, sculpture, installation art, textiles, and puppetry, to highlight the experiences of Afro Ecuadorians, Indonesian transgender women, and other marginalized communities.

Her projects have received recognition at major festivals and institutions, earning honors at the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Shogaolu's work has been showcased at the Museum of Modern Art, Tribeca Immersive, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the Open City Documentary Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Amsterdam Museum, the National Gallery of Indonesia, and the Arab American Museum, among others. Notable works include "Un(re)solved," an interactive documentary project for FRONTLINE that won the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling and examines federal investigations into more than 150 cold cases from the civil rights era, and the transmedia series "Queer in a Time of Forced Migration," which is based on oral histories of LGBTQ refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.

Shogaolu holds an MFA from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where she was a Burton Lewis Endowed Scholar for Directing. She is an inaugural Motion Picture Academy Accelerator Fellow, an Academy Nicholls Fellowship semi-finalist, a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, and a Luce Scholar in Indonesia. Shogaolu has also been a Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab Programs Fellow, a Gouden Kalf nominee, a Creative Capital Award recipient, a MIT Open DocLab Fellow, and a MacArthur Foundation grantee. She has delivered invited talks at Harvard, Leiden University, MIT, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Yale. With a portfolio spanning film, immersive media, and installation art, Shogaolu continues to expand the possibilities of storytelling in the fields of animation, documentary, and emerging media.