Curriculum vitae of Hugo Santander

Curriculum Vitae

Hugo Santander was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia in 1968. In 1990 he graduated in Social Communication from the Universidad Javeriana where he also started a Ph.D. in Philosophy.

In 1994, after staging several theater plays as the director of Arte Facto Teatro, and after obtaining a Post-graduate degree in Screenwriting from the Universidad del Rosario, he moved to the US , where he pursued an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Immediately after his graduation, having produced and directed several short films (amongst them po, which won the 1996 Temple University Motion Picture Association Scholarship,) he was appointed Associate Professor of Screenwriting and Creative Writing at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa of Oporto, Portugal, a country where he also directed lhas do Porto (Porto Ghettos) , a documentary broadcast in five continents by RTP (Public Radio and Television of Portugal).

In 2000 he moved to England, where he lectured at the University of Salford on Media Management, Acting for the Camera and Acting for Shakespeare--a course that included the direction and staging of his adaptation of Timon of Athens.

A 2002–2003 Lector of Spanish at the University of Manchester, he was awarded with a 2002 CEP fellowship, which allowed him to lecture at the American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) on Media Management, Screenwriting, Media in Conflict and History of American Media.

Hugo has written several entries for the Hodder Education Encyclopedia Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics (London: 2006.) He is also the author of The Crisis of Atheism, published in The Philosopher, the Journal of the Philosophical Society of England, and a novel published both Colombia and Spain: Nuevas Tardes en Manhattan (Manhattan New Soirées).

His first long-feature documentary Manatí: Portrait of a third-world happy Town, was edited in London between 2003 and 2006. In a twofold tour de force he has produced and shot two long-feature digital films: Hamlet Unbound (Philadelhia, 1998), and Kennedy's Crimes (Bucaramanga, 2010), both with no budget and with non-professional actors. As Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communications and Media Arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga, Hugo designed and consolidated from 2005 to 2010 the curriculum of the current program in Audovisual Arts, instructing the first generation of professional filmmakers in Bucaramanga, his hometown.

His short film Noche de Brujas (Witche's Night) was recently showcased at The Orlando Film Festival 2010.

Since August 2010, Hugo works as an Associate Professor at the Sivaji Ganesan Film and Television Institute at SRM University, Tamil Nadu, India.