MARTA Marta was born in Bogotá Colombia, raised in New York and New Orleans. She's been a photojournalist, traveling to Russia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Europe. Her photos have shown in galleries and museums throughout the world, including her photo essay on a charity mental hospital in Colombia. She's also worked as a still photographer on films that starred actors such as Nicolas Cage, John Savage, and Martin Sheen. Then writing became Marta's other obsession. On her return to New Orleans, she began a writing and directing collaboration with Tom Murphy. Their videos, shown at film festivals in New Orleans, New York and Los Angeles, tackled sensitive subjects. They won praise, awards and— sometimes— controversy. Marta was awarded a grant from Novac to produce her 20-minute Surreal Documentary, Disposable Income, loosely-based on Aileen Wuornos, the first female serial killer executed in the U.S. She and Tom were chosen as part of The Top Fifty to Watch by New Orleans Magazine, and were featured on the cover. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Marta was chosen for the WGA Writing Program, a paid internship with the writers at Star Trek Voyager. She was thrown in the midst of highly creative people constantly brainstorming— it was the most fun she's ever had at a day job. Marta's latest novel, The Vatican Solution, a political thriller set in post-World War II Italy, was a semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowship and the Chesterfield Writers Project. Marta second novel, Acapulco Buds, is an adult dark comedy novel set in the late 1960s. Love, war, dope, the CIA... and Go-Go dancing commies. Marta's first novel Spirit Land is a novel of love and horror set in New Orleans. An early draft of Bloodline, the Winter's Child— a girl's coming-of-age in a dysfunctional shapeshifting family— was a quarter-finalist in the Chesterfield Writers Project. She is reworking it into a novel She was awarded a Paul Verhoeven Scholarship and a Women in Film / Universal Studios Mentor Scholarship for the Feature Film Development Program of the Los Angeles Film School. Marta has published two photography books. The House on Rue Burgundy and Carnival Dreams She lives in Los Angeles, and loves it. She's presently working on The Dream Machine, a supernatural novel about time travel and soul transference in Hollywood— which is only partly autobiographical.