Gabriela Garcia Medina is a Cuban-American writer/director. Her short film LITTLE CON LILI (2019) won Best of Fest at HBO Women in Comedy Festival (2019), Best Short Contest NBC (2019), winner of LALIFF Best Short Film (2019), nominated for Best Short Comedy at Palm Springs ShortFest (2020), distributed with HBOMax (2019-2021), and later optioned by Netflix (2021-2023). Gabriela’s short film THE 90 DAY PLAN (2020), won Best of Fest at HBO Women in Comedy Festival (2020), Best Short Film – Powderkeg/Feigco Entertainment (2020), official selection PBS LatinXperience (2020), and distributed with HBOMax (2020-2023). Gabriela's short- musical comedy BERTIE THE BRILLIANT (2022) was made in collaboration with Warner Bros/OneFifty and Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB). BERTIE THE BRILLIANT premiered at the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences as part of the NFMLA IN FOCUS: LatinX & Hispanic Cinema. It screened at OUTFEST: Fusion Family Day (2023), LA PRIDE (presented by NFMLA) (2023), PBS Shorts Film Festival (2023), Hollyshorts (2023), Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (2023), among others, and is available on PBS. Gabriela’s short film WHAT TO EXPECT (2024) was made in collaboration with Latino Public Broadcasting and will distribute with PBS (2024), and her short film #BLESSED (2024) a feminist-martial-arts action-comedy was shot through the Rideback Rise fellowship and is currently in post-production.

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Gabriela’s feature film LITTLE CON LILI was selected as one of the five screenplays on the LatinX List (The Black List) 2023 and is in development with Mandalay Pictures. Gabriela’s feature screenplay SKRRRT! won The Athena List’s Disney Development Grant (2024) and was selected for Cate Blanchett’s Dirty Films/Netflix Proof of Concept Accelerator (2024). Gabriela’s feature film FOR YOUR OWN GOOD was Top-five finalist for TriBeCa’s AT&T’s Untold Stories $1M (2024). Her romantic musical comedy MEDIO SUMMER is in development with MACRO. And her feature THE KIDNAPPING OF CASIMIRO CORONADO is in development through the Rideback Rise non-profit film incubator (2023-2024). Gabriela is the NFMLA 2023 Filmmaker of the Year, a Rideback Rise fellow (2023-2024). She is an Academy of Motion Picture, Arts & Sciences Film Accelerator fellow (2022), a Film Independent Directing Lab fellow (2020), and a Hedgebrook Screenwriting Lab fellow (2016). Gabriela received her BFA from UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television, with a major in Theater, and a double minor in Chicano/a Studies and African American Studies. She holds two MFA degrees from California Institute of the Arts.

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Prior to being a filmmaker, Gabriela was a spoken word poet. She has performed at over 1000 colleges/universities and has opened the stage for artists including Pitbull, Mos Def, and the Black-Eyed Peas, as well as for political figures including Kamala Harris, and Maxine Waters.