Chelo Alvarez-Stehle

Originally from Logroño, Chelo Alvarez-Stehle is an international journalist and documentary filmmaker. In 1991, she moved to Japan on an EEC scholarship and worked in Tokyo for the NHK channel as a consultant for documentary projects, as well as being editor-in-chief of Japan's first Spanish-language weekly, International Press en Español, and correspondent for the newspaper El Mundo.

In 1995 she moved to Los Angeles and continued collaborating with El Mundo, as well as starting to work in the documentary genre with Niñas de hojalata (Canal+), based on one of her reports, as an interviewer, assistant director and consultant. She also directed and produced short documentaries such as Sold in America on trafficking and Through the Wall on emigration (winner of an Imagen Award and acquired by The Guardian and PBS). She has received numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic for her feature-length documentary Arenas de silencio (Sands of Silence) on sexual violence and trafficking, broadcast on RTVE, WORLD Channel and PBS, which she presented at the United Nations in New York and at the European Parliament.

Her articles have been published in Geo, Planeta Humano, El País, The Malibu Times, The Huffington Post, the Documentary magazine and The Guardian, among others.

She has been invited to present her documentaries at universities from Oxford to Hiroshima, UCLA to Yale, as well as international forums from New York to New Delhi.