from concept to pitch: my animated journey

Hello! My name is Adela Hurtado, and I’m a director, creative producer, animator, and lawyer now studying at Gobelins in Paris! I’m from Miami Beach, Florida, born to immigrants from Trujillo, Peru, where I spent every summer of my childhood. In the 6th grade, I read the classical Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms , and I admired Zhuge Liang. I dreamed of going to his Chengdu temple! The mix of my Peruvian heritage, classical Chinese literary works, exposure to foreign films, and the sunny art deco Miami Beach, influenced who I am. I also grew up during Nickelodeon’s Golden Age, the Disney Renaissance, Japanese anime’s US arrival, Looney Toons reruns, and more. It was wonderful time, and it led me to deeply love animation, the stories it can tell, and what it can do for people.

I attended NYU where I studied politics, even taking courses taught by Moss Roberts, who translated RoT3K into English--the same version I lugged around in elementary school! I finally studied abroad in China, and it was a dream come true. There I took up photography and started the Shikumen of Shanghai .  

It was also there that I saw, "The Making of Disney's Sleeping Beauty." I thought, "I hope to be part of something that beautiful one day." Although I had been researching and loving animated works to an extremely nerdy level since I was a child, thinking it was the most beautiful form of art, my parents encouraged me early on to pursue law for stability. I understood why. However, that changed—I knew I had to be in animation someway, somehow.

TAKING THE FIRST STEPS

I earned my J.D. at Fordham Law, where I studied law by day and took film and animation classes at night. I studied again in China, where I continued photography and studied Chinese animation! I worked as a lawyer advocating public interest causes while taking production assistant jobs and animation night classes. I was accepted into the Yenching Academy at Peking University, where I focused on Chinese and Latin American animation law and policies. I gradually gained freelance work as a 2D animator and production designer on a range of interesting projects.

Wanting to give back, I co-founded and became president of organizations such as the NYU Latinx Alumni Network and Viva La Animación to raise Latin voices in animation and have organized legal workshops for filmmakers and animators. I also began The Colors of Trujillo photography project.

coming full circle: development in paris

I took part of Gobelins’ Summer Visual Storytelling Program, where I worked on my film, Concheperla, for the first time. I loved it so much I applied to the Masters Program in Visual Storytelling, and I got in! Now, I’m fully immersed in developing projects from concept to pitch, which I’ve discovered is the direction I want to take my career. It all came full circle for me when in 2025, I went to UNESCO’s HQ in Paris not as a lawyer, but as an artist, and successfully pitched an animated show helping children across Africa. I’m living my dream of being in animation and working on my projects in Paris—and I can’t wait to see where I go from here!

My dream is to one day direct an animated feature film set in Peru.