Camilo Garzón is a Colombian-American writer, filmmaker, multiplatform editor, award-winning voice and creative director, award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, oral historian, award-winning multimedia producer, and freelance journalist.
He was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and moved to the United States of America in 2011 at the age of 18. He is a graduate from Rollins College, with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Religious Studies, cum laude. He became a dual citizen of the US and Colombia in 2017. He has lived in the United States, Colombia, and Spain.
He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2020, where he splits his working time writing, editing, producing, and directing a variety of projects and with a diverse portfolio of clients.
In October 2023, he founded Cuentero Productions in Oakland, California. Cuentero is a bilingual, multimedia production house weaving entertaining fiction and non-fiction tales, where he leads as its creative director. For all work before that date, feel free to keep reading below.
Camilo’s work in multimedia productions has been supported, featured, or is forthcoming via a variety of NPR’s radio programs and podcasts including All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Morning Edition, TED Radio Hour, Alt.Latino, as well as via Wolf at the Door, Tribeca Audio’s 2023 Official Selects, Qatar Foundation’s Doha Debates, Al Jazeera, Imposter Media, Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, KQED’s Rightnowish, Biomimicry Institute’s AskNature, Adonde Media’s Duolingo Spanish Podcast, On Air Fest 2022 Official Selects, WBGO’s Jazz Night In America, BirdNote Daily, BirdNote en español, BirdNote’s Threatened, America’s Test Kitchen’s Proof, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and its Proyecto Mission Murals, Hark Audio's partnership with The Atlantic, the Stanford Center on Longevity’s Century Lives, among others. More about them on the “Audio,” “Digital,” and “Film” tabs on this website.
Camilo’s non-fiction writing has been published or is forthcoming via the National Geographic Society, SFMOMA’s Proyecto Mission Murals, Scientific American, Skybound Entertainment, Audible, Doha Debates’ Necessary Tomorrows, NPR’s Weekend Edition, NPR’s Alt.Latino, KQED Arts, The Creative Independent, American Geophysical Union’s Eos magazine, The Latinx Project at NYU’s Intervenxions, Podcaster@s, Rest of World, Revista Cultural Días Temáticos, Las2orillas, Biomimicry Institute’s AskNature, and the Orlando Sentinel, among others. More about it on the “Non-Fiction” tab on this website.
In his journalism and documentary career, Camilo has been able to write, edit, and produce stories and create features focused on people like Jorge Drexler, Carlos Dengler, Draco Rosa, Lorena Rodríguez Gallo, Liniers, Carolin Früh, Jorge Carrión, Paul Rose, Andrés Ruzo, Baker Perry, Tom Matthews, Gabby Rivera, Simón Mejía, Pedro Patarroyo, Asha Stuart, Juliana Machado Ferreira, Juana Alicia, John Jota Leaños, Pendarvis Harshaw, Rebecca Charbonneau, Martha Lucía Calvache, Federico Ardila, May-Li Khoe, Kim Shuck, Roberto Lovato, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Josiah Luis Alderete, among others.
He’s been able to report and field produce journalistic and documentary stories in the United States of America in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Virginia, Maryland, Texas, and the District of Columbia, as well as in his home country of Colombia, in both the Departamento de Santander and in his native Bogotá. Some of the locations that he’s been able to be a tape syncer and a location field recordist (AKA a fly on the wall with an audio recorder) and a witness to the making of history and geography are: a NICU in a hospital in Houston, an early childhood education center in Albuquerque, the office of an ASU geographer in Phoenix, an ant shop in San Gil, a DACA-being-rescinded protest in front of the White House in D.C., Yolanda López’s home in the San Francisco Mission District, and his grandma’s living room in Bogotá.
His fiction and poetic work has been featured or is forthcoming via on-off.site, Poets Reading the News, Revista Innombrable, Brushing Art and Literary Journal, and Rollins College’s The Independent, among others. His work has been read and selected to be performed for an audience through the SFMOMA, Play On Words, Speaking Axolotl, Beast Crawl Lit Fest, the San José Museum of Art, LITEROCALYPSE, San Francisco Foundation, Nomadic Press, and The Emperor’s New Prose, among others. Along with news and human interest stories, Camilo also writes screenplays, essays, short stories, and poetry. He likes blurring the lines in his writing like others before him: between poems and prose, between philosophy and literature, and between Spanish and English. More about these in the “Poetry and Fiction” tab on this website.
His literature has won praise and awards like the inaugural San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press literary award. Camilo is also an interdisciplinary artist. During the month of February 2022, he was an artist-in-residence at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado, where he worked on writing his debut novel.
Screenshot of the four radio documentaries Camilo co-wrote and co-produced with Alex Ariff for Jazz Night In America about the 2022 NEA Jazz Masters
During the spring of 2022, Camilo co-produced and co-wrote with Alex Ariff a series of four radio documentaries honoring the 2022 class of National Endowment for the Arts’ Jazz Masters, the highest distinction in the United State of America for the art of improvisational music.
They were produced for WBGO’s, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s, and NPR Music’s weekly radio program Jazz Night In America, hosted by the Grammy Award winning bassist and radio host, Christian McBride.
The four profiles were on: Big Chief, the saxophonist and multiversal musician, Donald Harrison Jr.; the subtle singer, subversive songwriter, Cassandra Wilson; the Zen-like figure that is drummer, Billy Hart aka Jabali; and the prolific composer and virtuoso doubler, Stanley Clarke.
And during the summer of 2022, he assisted in the production and sound design of the first Jazz Night in America Youngbloods series, featuring and showcasing five up-and-coming jazz geniuses who are revolutionizing the genre. He worked in four out of the five episodes on this series, showcasing the talents of Immanuel Wilkins, Samara Joy, Isaiah J. Thompson, Sean Mason, and Sarah Hanahan.
Jazz Night in America's inaugural Youngbloods series. Poster by Amna Ijaz.
From the fall of 2020 through the winter of 2022, Camilo worked with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in various capacities for an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded arts and community-based initiative, the Proyecto Mission Murals. He wrote the majority of the SFMOMA official artist biographies related to the project. He also guided, co-narrated, edited, produced, and mixed 19 oral histories in English and Spanish, with artists, muralists, educators, poets, lawyers, historians and storytellers who were involved in the San Francisco's Mission District's mural scene in the 70's and 80's in order to retrieve, document, present and archive their stories and histories. The narrators of these oral histories were Frances Valesco, Carlos “Kookie” Gonzalez, Michael Rios, Susan Cervantes, Ray Patlán, Yolanda López, Eduardo Pineda, Consuelo Mendez, Mia Galaviz de Gonzales, Ana Montano, Ester Hernández, Daniel Galvez, Dewey Crumpler, Nancy “Pili” Hernandez, Patricia Rodriguez, Irene Perez, Estria Miyashiro, Xochitl Nevel-Guerrero, Brooke Oliver, and Amalia Mesa-Bains.
Camilo recording ambiance sound (aka ambi) from Balmy Alley – in the company of filmmaker Javier Briones – which is the home to the most concentrated collection of murals in the city of San Francisco, California. Mainly created by - or directly influenced - by Latinx and Chicanx muralists, including the Mujeres Muralistas. Photograph by Erica Gangsei.
Another part of Camilo’s collaboration on this larger project was being part of the production of a 25-minute documentary short film that is best described as a love letter to the San Francisco Mission District and its muralistas, titled: "Las Muralistas: Our Walls, Our Stories." For this documentary film, he was fortunate enough to be one of its main interviewers, one of its sound recordists, and its sole consulting producer. The documentary film premiered at the 2022 San Francisco ShortFest and was also recognized by the LA Independent Shorts Awards (ISA) with the Bronze Award under the Best Documentary Short category and by the LATINO Feedback Festival with its Audience Award.
Camilo directed his team, performed and read some of his poetry, and introduced and concluded the first live performance of The Mission Muralismo Audio Zine - Volume I at SFMOMA’s The Art of Murals symposium. Photograph by Nithya Vasudevan.
He also led the production of an experimental audio collection—an audio zine. He led a team that was mainly composed of a production assistant; a producer, scorer, and sound-designer; a guitarist; two narrators; and worked in tandem with two executive producers. The audio zine featured a dozen interconnected anecdotes and site-specific audio stops for a digital platform and AR experience highlighting some of the murals from San Francisco's Mission District, its artists, and its community. Camilo directed, sound-designed, co-wrote, edited, scripted, produced and mixed this experimental audio project. An outtake from the larger audio zine – titled ‘Ode to La 24’ – was recognized as one of the thirty On Air Fest 2022 "Official Selects." The audio zine was also a 2022 Webby Award nominee on the Podcasts — Individual Episodes (Arts & Culture category) and an inaugural Signal Awards winner (Bronze Award) on the Individual Episode (Arts & Culture) category.
Poet Josiah Luis Alderete, directed by Camilo, reads his poem “The Galería de la Raza Blues” to the audience at SFMOMA’s Koret Education Center. Photograph by Beth LaBerge.
Camilo was the creative director leading this aforementioned team for the first listening session of the audio zine at SFMOMA’s Free Community Day: Diego Rivera’s America and for the first live performance of the audio zine at SFMOMA’s The Art of Murals symposium. Outside of the SFMOMA Proyecto Mission Murals, Camilo also served as a consulting producer for the audio guide for SFMOMA’s exhibition Diego Rivera's America, providing his expertise and knowledge for the creation of the guide. Camilo also translated and edited some of the exhibition's blurbs and museum copy into Spanish.
During the spring and summer of 2022, Camilo helped BirdNote – in partnership with Manomet – to launch BirdNote en español, a BirdNote Daily spin-off podcast in Spanish. For the project, he wrote, guest hosted, narrated, and assisted in the production of 12 pairs of bilingual episodes that had dual release.
A photograph of Wilson’s Phalaropes in Mar Chiquita, Argentina. One of the bilingual pair of episodes was on this species. Photograph by Yanina Druetta.
From May till October 2021, Camilo was the artist-in-residence at Bay Area digital arts collective on-off.site. His project was titled: “Pandæmonium.” An interactive, serialized proem that invites public participation and dialogue to co-create a space that is truly built collectively, exploring collective human experiences of the pandemic. This project blends prose, poetry, and hellish imagery to process the surreality of our shifting world and create moments of connection through collaboration. Each section of the proem included an “Opening,” an invitation for members of the public to respond to creative prompts in the text and have their submissions included in the project and be credited as a co-creator. 30 people from 3 continents and from 23 locations ended up participating and co-creating it. As background, Camilo started the proem in March 2020 while he was under strict lockdown in Madrid and grappling with the desire for human connection and fear of the contagion it might bring. This inspired him to reimagine Hell through proetry and create opportunities for connection by inviting collaborators to build this alternate hellscape with him by contributing to and co-creating the multimedia text. Framed within the current pandemic and isolation that has occurred because of it, this poetic and collaborative work takes on a new resonance. Rather than it being about the poet, the work itself invites a legion of collaborators to change and alter the shape of the final work.
Camilo is holding typed pages from “Pandæmonium,” while a photo is taken from above the ground in Berkeley, California’s Normandy Village. Photograph by Stephanie Smith.
From the spring of 2020 until the summer of 2021, Camilo edited, published poetry, and facilitated events with Poets Reading the News (PRTN), an Oakland-based literary organization with the mission to enact poetry’s vital cultural function as a processor for violence, cultural complexity, and political change in a society overwhelmed by the headlines. He became a managing editor for the publication in March 2021 and left in July 2021. Before that, he was one of its associate poetry editors. In that role he ideated, pitched, and facilitated the collaboration event between on-off.site and PRTN titled “Catharsis: An Inauguration Poetry Reading,” in which four invited poets helped the attendees to process the enormity of the end of Donald Trump's presidency and the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Camilo and other attendees at the 2018 National Geographic Explorers Festival. Photograph by Taylor Mickal.
From 2017 through 2019, Camilo was a digital content editor and multimedia producer at the National Geographic Society, mainly managing an array of digital projects for its world-renowned impact programs and initiatives like Pristine Seas, the Okavango Wilderness Project, the Photo Ark, among others.
During his time at the Society he also moonlighted by writing about the 2018 National Geographic’s Explorers Festival, the untold story of the Titanic, conducted interviews, spotlights, and Q&A’s with Explorers, and was the lead writer, content editor, and digital producer for an expedition journal on the most comprehensive single scientific expedition to Mount Everest to date.
Camilo helps tape sync the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, for a conversation with NPR’s Morning Edition about the situation in Venezuela on March 2017. Photograph courtesy of the Organization of American States (OAS).
From 2016 through 2018, Camilo was producing and occasionally reporting and writing stories at National Public Radio (NPR). While at NPR, he was the Fall 2016 production intern for the TED Radio Hour, a radio show and podcast that takes the listener on a journey through fascinating ideas, with Guy Raz. After his internship, Camilo worked as a radio producer with some of the most-listened to news programs in the nation: NPR’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition and Morning Edition. On these programs he scripted, gathered voices, and produced segments and coverage about DACA being rescinded by the Trump administration; the respective effects of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in the Eastern Americas and the Caribbean; the 2017 Mexico earthquake; as well as breaking news about the 2017 Manchester and Barcelona attacks, among other major stories. He helped book conversations and bring a variety of voices to NPR's air including Jodie Foster, William Ury, Yanis Varoufakis, Irina Bokova, Alli Webb, Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others. He also served as the field producer, and has tape synced, for interviews with David Petraeus, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, and other guests. Sometimes he also provided voice-overs in audio stories. While at NPR, Camilo also reported and produced stories with some of its podcasts. He did digital and post-production work with the team of Radio Ambulante and contributed to NPR's Alt.Latino by writing, reporting, and producing for the program, mainly in the form of audio and digital stories.
Camilo presents his TEDx Talk on narratives and the self at TEDxYouth@GLM in Bogotá, Colombia, on April 2015. Screenshot of the video.
Camilo has also been an invited speaker to international conferences, symposia, colloquia, and events focused on art, ideas, media, education, international relations, diplomacy, oral history, and philosophy. In 2022, at the Oral History Association's 56th Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, California, Camilo co-presented a session titled “La Misión, Mi Corazón: The Proyecto Mission Murals As a Fire-Starter Experiment in Oral History Presentation and New Media” with Cary Cordova and Myisa Plancq-Graham at Los Angeles’ Millennium Biltmore Hotel about the oral histories and new media experiments of the SFMOMA-organized and IMLS-funded Proyecto Mission Murals. He gave a talk at a session from the 2021 International Association Of Sound and Audiovisual Archives conference, which he titled: "Oral Histories as Accessible and Democratic Audio Technologies of the Self." He presented a paper in Eugene, OR in July 2016 vindicating Nicolás Gómez Dávila as a philosopher and his body of work as scholia. He also gave a praise-oriented presentation on the Liberal Arts in Dublin, Ireland in June 2015. He was invited in April 2015 to give his first TEDx Talk in his hometown of Bogotá headlining TEDxYouth@GLM 2015 about narratives and selfhood. He has also written papers and given presentations in Orlando, FL, and in Washington, DC.
Camilo has edited research guides for international non-governmental organizations such as Associazione Diplomatici, an Italian entity in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations that is committed to a multicultural education of students from all over the world. He also served as its Vice-Director of Studies and Representative in the Americas. For Diplomatici’s Change the World MUN in New York City, he led as its Chief of Dais — a group of staff composed of 50 team-members from 20 countries. The 2016 conference that he led was the first of its kind to be entirely held at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, drawing more than 2000 students from 100 countries.
Camilo with Sabrina Santonocito, Alessandro Dimaiuta, Amer Nasr, and Claudio Corbino at the United Nations Headquarters, General Assembly, during the closing ceremony of Change the World MUN in New York City on March 2016. Screenshot of the closing ceremony, available online at UN Webcast.
Camilo with some of his students from I.E.S. Enrique Tierno Galván in December 2019 at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, Spain.
Camilo is also an educator. Since early 2024 he has been teaching Spanish classes at the Centro Latino of Berkeley, California. During the 2020-2021 academic year – and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic – he taught and tutored Spanish to a number of local San Francisco Bay Area students online and adapted his lessons and these student’s individual Spanish language learning to their specific interests. During the 2019-2020 academic year, he was an Assistant English Teacher (Auxiliar de Conversación) with the Comunidad de Madrid, teaching 16 different classes to all levels of high school students. He also taught English electives on administration, finance and business, as well as computing and IT. While in Madrid, Spain, he also taught individual and group classes teaching Spanish to beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, mainly to other English teachers that lived in the area. He previously was a Spanish language Teaching Fellow with The Global Language Network, whose mission is to use language as a tool to help fix our world. He was also a private tutor with Varsity Tutors, teaching a variety of subjects from Comparative Literature to Philosophy, Public Speaking and Spanish at high school and college levels. While at Rollins College, he worked at its tutoring center, assisting more than 50 students in different courses. He served as the only native tutor for upper-level classes in Spanish.