Bio
Maia Iotzova is a filmmaker and an artist who grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is now based in Montreal, Canada. Maia holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Guelph, Canada.
Maia's passion for the natural environment led her to explore documentary film. In 2004 she released her first documentary Grass Though Concrete: The Struggle to Protect the Red Hill Valley (72min). Since then she has been developing a personal storytelling approach that draws on her intercultural perspective and mixes traditional documentary with experimental cinema techniques. In 2015 she released her first author film, Green Dream (50 min), a contemplation on nature's place within the city. Distributed by V-tape the film played in festivals in Bulgaria, Australia and Malaysia and has been screened in cinema programs in Canada and Switzerland. In relationship to the film she started the Wild City Mapping Project, an on-line open source based participatory map of the wild green spaces in Montreal.
Maia is dedicated to creating a welcoming community and to supporting the female creative voice in the media industry. From 2011 to 2015 she was the co-host to the XX Files Radio show of the feminist new media Studio XX. Presently she is one of the leaders of the Film Fatales Chapter in Montreal.
When she is not working on her own projects, Maia freelances as an editor and assistant editor. Two of the main companies that she works for are Arnait Video Productions and the Isuma TV collective.