Misha Vallejo Prut

Misha Vallejo Prut is an Ecuadorian audio-visual storyteller whose work lies at the border between documentary and art. His main interests lie in the portrayal of the lost person and the lost place with a special emphasis in environmental issues, as well as the banal everyday life of Latin American communities. 

He has a master's degree in documentary photography from the University of the Arts London. His photobooks Al otro lado (Editora Madalena, Sao Paulo 2016), Siete punto Ocho, and Secreto Sarayaku (both RM, Barcelona, 2018 and 2020) have received several international awards in Latin America, the U.S., and Europe. His photographic work has been shown around the world, a highlight of which are his participations at the PHOTO 2022 Festival in Melbourne (Australia), the Biennale Für Aktuelle Fotografie 2022 (Germany), the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in 2018 (France), and the First Latin American Foto Festival at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York, 2018. In 2020 he released his first interactive web documentary at www.secretsarayaku.net, which has been well received by the international community with more than 12,000 visits (and counting). 

Among others, he has won the Dom Phillips grant from the Pulitzer Center (U.S., 2023), the Goethe Institut and Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Artistic Response for Environmental Change (Germany & Netherlands, 2019), the Photo Europe Network Prize at the PhotOn Festival in Valencia (Spain, 2018), and the Ecuadorian National Arts Prize Mariano Aguilera (2015). 

His work has been exhibited in galleries, cultural centers, and festivals around the world and has been published in such media as The New York Times, The Washington Post, VICE, GEO, Marie Claire, and others. 

Nowadays he is based in Ecuador and is working on his first feature documentary film Light Memories, which was awarded an IDFA Bertha Fund grant in autumn of 2022.