María José Maldonado

María José Maldonado (she/they/fairy) is a genderqueer Salvadorian-Ecuadorian filmmaker, writer and artist born & raised in Queens, NY. María José’s films celebrate the fabulous Latine queer & trans people in her life. Their work resists the incessant narrative that LGBTQ+ Latines are rejected & disowned by their families, and instead resists machismo & transphobia en la casa through intimate portrayals & discussions with her big ass Latine family—blood & chosen.

María José is a BRIC Documentary Intensive Film Lab 2022 alum, Toronto Queer Film Festival DIY Film Lab alum 2020-2021 where she wrote, directed & produced her first docushort “CALL 1-800-SALVI” about searching for queer Salvadoran friends in Toronto, the lead in award-winning Canadian short “Saturday Fuego Diablo” (Dir. Anita Abbasi, 2022), Lambda Literary Speculative Fiction Fellow 2022, Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Writers Workshop Fiction Fellow 2021, Leslie-Lohman Artist Fellow 2020, Barbara Deming Fund 2020 grantee for feminist fiction & a Queer|Art Mentorship Literature Fellow 2019 mentored by Charles Rice-González. Currently, she is a Visual AIDS Research Fellow 2023 where she is archiving her aunt Bianca's cultural and artistic contributions and writing a piece about Bianca set to be published by Visual AIDS in December 2023.

Previously, María José was a NYC high school counselor before earning a JD/MBA from Howard University. She was a management consultant making six figures before quitting to pursue art full-time in 2019. Since then, María José’s been cobbling together her own DIY art school education through film labs, artist fellowships & film classes. She is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Dartmouth College and Howard University.

I’m a queer nonbinary Salvadoran-Ecuadorian writer + creative born and raised in Queens, NY.

I’m funny. I’m pescatarian. I’m a socialist feminist cat owner. What’s not to love?

I’ll be posting my very important thoughts, very high quality videos and very gay poems and short stories on here. I hope you like reading about lesbian demons & vegetarian chupacabras & gays at the bodega. I’m an Aquarius Sun, Leo Rising & Aries Moon — queers love astro <3

My work focuses on queerness, Salvadoran identity, rage and feminism. I write speculative fiction, poetry, zines and whatever I want!

I am Lambda Literary 2022 Speculative Fiction Fellow for the Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices in a week-long workshop led by Larissa Lai (upcoming), an alum of Macondo Writers Workshop 2022 Fiction workshop led by Alex Espinoza, a 2020-2021 Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellow, 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship Literature Fellow under the mentorship of Charles Rice-González, a 2020-2021 Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Awardee for feminist fiction, graduate of “Creative Writing from Queer Resistance” workshop led by Nancy Agabian & sponsored by the Leslie-Lohman Museum and Poets & Writers. My writing has appeared in Autostraddle and countless Muji notebooks scattered around my Canadian crib in the 6ix. I’m a proud alum of Howard University, Phillips Exeter Academy, Prep for Prep and I also graduated from Dartmouth College.