Benji Santayana Zusman

Benji Santayana Zusman is a Cuban-Peruvian-American writer, director and actor who’s made documentaries and narrative fiction films in all three roles, from his home state of Florida to Panama to Beirut. His documentary and fiction roots combine with his international background to produce stories.

On a Rockefeller Fellowship, he lived with the Embera people in the Darien Gap for a year, shooting a documentary following the construction of the Pan-American Highway through this contested region. The film, The Road to Darien, screened at the TED Conference in Oxford, where he gave a talk as a TED Global Fellow. As a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, he edited a documentary on gangs and gun violence in San Francisco, Bullet Proof, which played at Gavin Newsom’s Mayors Conference. Prior to attending NYU Tisch Graduate Film School on a Peter D. Gould Scholarship, he was a production assistant to Julie and Roger Corman, for whom he eventually worked up to directing 2nd unit. He co-starred in Dana Bdeir’s “Bil Abyad” (In White), which won Best Int’l Short Film at Milan Int’l Film Festival. Most recently, his feature script “The Liar’s Paradox” won the $150,000 NYU Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize.