Thais Guisasola

Directing

Born: June 18, 1987 (age 39) · San Francisco, California, USA

Thais Guisasola is a Brazilian-American director and screenwriter. Her work has been presented at Documenta 14 in Kassel, curated by Paul B. Preciado; the San Sebastián International Film Festival; the Locarno Film Festival; the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; the BFI London Film Festival; the Queens Museum in New York; and other international venues and festivals.

In 2018, Thais received the Best Director Award at the Cartagena International Film Festival in Colombia for her feature film The Whisper of the Jaguar, a bold genre-bending narrative filmed in the Brazilian Amazon. As a screenwriter, Thais contributed to two seasons of the series Pop Philosophy with Márcia Tiburi. She is also one of the creative minds behind Netflix’s Brazilian original series The Bite (Boca a Boca), and directed the web series Untitled (Sem Título) for SESCTV and the SESC Art Collection. In addition, she is the writer and co-author of the German feature film PIAFFE, which premiered in the Official Competition at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and was selected for the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2022.

Thais lived in New York and Berlin for more than eight years. She holds a degree in Film and Political Philosophy from Hampshire College in Massachusetts and studied screenwriting in Havana, Cuba. Sexual diversity and ancestral knowledge are central themes in her work. Together with Julia Anquier, she is developing the feature film SANGUEIRO, which they are co-writing and co-directing. SANGUEIRO was selected for the TFL Extended Lab in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2024, and was a finalist in the FRAPA 2023 Treatment Competition in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

In 2026, Thais will be presenting two new projects at the Festival do Rio. She is the screenwriter of Amora, a fiction series created with Julia Anquier for Canal Brasil, and a guest screenwriter and director of Ney por Trás das Máscaras, a documentary feature directed by Esmir Filho about Brazilian musician Ney Matogrosso.