Writer-director M.G. Evangelista was born in Manila and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Evangelista received an MFA from the NYU Tisch Graduate Film Program for Writing and Directing. Their thesis short film, Fran This Summer, is an LGBTQ summer love story that won the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest before playing in forty film festivals worldwide, including Sundance. They are a cocreator of Water Melts, a Tribeca Film Institute and Google-supported VR rom-com, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. They completed Film Independent’s Project Involve Fellowship directing the short film, La Gloria, which premiered at the Miami Film Festival. La Gloria was an HBO Ibero-American Short Film Award finalist and received a Special Mention for Best LGBTQ+ Short at Palm Springs Shortsfest. Evangelista’s debut feature film, Burning Well, is currently in development. It is a recipient of the 2020 Tribeca All Access Grant, a 2021 WIF x Sundance Finance Intensive Fellowship, and an ARRAY + Google production grant. Currently, the project is part of the prestigious Torino FeatureLab and took part in the Film Fatales: Trans Stories Fellowship.