It Just Feels Right with Filmmaker and Screenwriter Paloma Valenzuela | ¿Quién Tú Eres? Podcast

What does success look like to you?
Many of us have a milestone in mind when we think of success. Like, selling your screenplay to a studio means you’re successful. Or seeing your work on the runway means you’re successful. And don’t get me wrong, those are amazing goals. But what about what you’re doing right now?
Are you successful right now?
This week’s guest is a screenwriter who produces her own films. And while she’d love to see her work on the big screen and walk the most amazing red carpets, she considers herself a success right now. Even while she’s picking up gigs and teaching part-time in universities in addition to producing her own work. And it’s because she’s still working on her art. She’s still producing and creating and writing because it just feels right.
Paloma Valenzuela is a Dominican-American, screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, and lecturer originally from the city of Boston. She is the creative director of the production company La Palomita Productions. She is the writer/producer/creator of the comedic web series "The Pineapple Diaries". The show was featured in the Latina Magazine's "5 Web Series Every Latinx Needs to Watch Right Now", The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Remezcla, and Hip Latina. She is a 2018-2019 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Neighborhood Salon Luminary and a 2019 City of Boston Artist Fellow as well as was chosen for the WBUR Boston’s NPR Artery 25 in 2019.
Her work has been an official selection at film festivals such as The New Orleans Film Festival, Roxbury International Film Festival, and Miami Short Film Festival. She has taught screenwriting and film at Brandeis University, GrubStreet in Boston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art and has given workshops at Harvard University, Wellesley College, UMASS Boston, UMASS Amherst, Wesleyan University, and The New School. She is currently finishing production and post-production for her short film “The Seltzer Factory”, a documentary/narrative hybrid film exploring her maternal family’s history in Hungary and Romania. The film is set to premiere in 2023.
In this week’s episode, Paloma shares her experience creating a web series and how she’s measuring her success as a working artist. There is always the outside pressure to consider yourself an artist when you’ve made it big. But success to her is just continuing to make art. She’s producing her own work, picking up gigs, and teaching part-time, and she feels pretty successful. Check out her episode to hear more about her journey as an artist.
This week, we talked about:
- How she handles haters who say she’s not Dominican enough
- How she raised $3,000 for her web series The Pineapple Diaries
- How she measures success as a working artist
- Finding the balance between autonomy and security as a working artist
Check out It Just Feels Right with Paloma Valenzuela on the ¿Quién Tú Eres? Podcast