Diego Armando Aparicio

Diego Armando Aparicio was born in Limassol in 1993. His mother is Cypriot, originally from Anogyra, while his father is from El Salvador. He attended public schools in the Limassol district, graduating with honours from the Catholic Gymnasium and the Apostles Peter and Paul Lyceum, where he was honoured as standard-bearer and flag-bearer respectively. During his school years, he distinguished himself in various pan-Cypriot Olympiads, while also completing five GCE A-Level diplomas with A* and A grades.

He completed his military service in 2012 before moving to England to study at some of the world's leading universities on a scholarship from the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation. He graduated with a degree in physics and First-Class Honours from Imperial College London in 2016 and completed his postgraduate studies in quantum technologies with Distinction at University College London in 2017. He worked for two years at a hospital in Cambridge as a trainee in the field of medical physics and returned to Cyprus in 2019, making a career shift to cinema - which is his main professional activity to date.

He has been collaborating with companies in the audiovisual industry in Cyprus since 2019 in the production and directing departments for international film co-productions, including feature films and television series, which premiered at some of the most important festivals internationally, such as the Venice Film Festival, Critics' Week at Cannes, and the Sundance Film Festival in the USA. Most recently, he worked as third assistant director on a Cypriot co-production that was shortlisted for the 2026 Oscar for Best International Feature Film.

Since 2020, he has been mainly active in the field of cultural production. He is perhaps best known in the country's cultural landscape as the founder and artistic director of the Cyprus LGBTQI+ Film Festival, Queer Wave: a festival that in its six years has offered over 250 premieres of LGBTQI+ films from around the world at the local level, encouraging the fermentation of the wider artistic community of the island with civil society. It focused on Nicosia with the aim of establishing the festival as an event with intercommunal participation, while Queer Wave, now also a cultural organisation with a wider scope, continues to occupy space south and north of the green line, within the buffer zone and outside the capital, bringing communities closer together - one film at a time.

For his work within the framework of Queer Wave's inter-community LGBTQI+ action - and the festival's contribution to SBA16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions - he was selected as one of 20 finalists worldwide for the Commonwealth Youth Awards 2021, among a thousand nominees from 43 countries. She served as a member of the jury for the Giornate degli Autori section at the 75th Venice International Film Festival and contributed to the film selection process for the same section for five years. In 2022, he was a member of the selection committee for the European Parliament's LUX Audience Award, and in 2024 she served as a member of the jury for the Teddy Awards at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival. She has participated in pan-European and international professional programmes such as the Atelier for Young Festival Managers, the Future of Film Festivals Forum, the Global Cultural Relations Programme and Developing Your Film Festival. She has been a member of the European Film Academy for three years.

In addition to Greek, he speaks English, Spanish and Italian.