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 sold in 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. His long-feature digital film Hamlet Unbound was produced in 1998 in Philadelphia, with no budget and with non-professional actors. Hugo lives currently in his hometown, where he works as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communications and Media Arts, Program in Audovisual Arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga, UNAB.