In 2006 Ayala began her collaboration with
Dan Fallshaw on
Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea, a documentary set in
Mauritania, about corruption in the oil industry, that follows the investigations of mathematician Yahyia Ould Hamidoune against
Woodside Petroleum. On the same subject Ayala co-wrote
Slick Operator an article published in the front page of
The Sydney Morning Herald. Ayala's feature directorial debut, the highly controversial documentary
Stolen (2009), premiered internationally at the
Toronto International Film Festival in September 2009. In 2015 Ayala made
The Bolivian Case, a feature about a high profile case concerning three Norwegian teenage girls caught with 22 kg of cocaine in an airport in Bolivia. The film was shot in
Cochabamba and
Oslo, premiered in the Special Presentation Program at Toronto's
Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in May 2015, has won an audience award at the Sydney Film Festival and was shortlisted for
Platino Awards and Premios Fénix. Ayala's short film
The Fight (2017) focused on a protest by a group of
people with disabilities that march across the
Andes in
wheelchairs and on foot for 35 days to the seat of the government in
La Paz, asking to speak to President
Evo Morales about a disability pension and were repressed by the police. The film was released worldwide by
The Guardian in May 2017 and has won a
Walkley Award, the
Deutsche Welle Doc Dispatch Award at the
Sheffield Doc/Fest, as well as a nomination for an IDA Documentary Award and was a finalist for the
Rory Peck Sony Impact Award. Ayala is an alumnus of the
Film Independent Documentary Lab, the
Berlinale Talent Campus,
HotDocs Forum,
Britdoc Good Pitch,
IFP and a
Sundance and
Tribeca Film Institute fellow. Ayala's documentary
Cocaine Prison was filmed inside San Sebastian prison in
Cochabamba, by the inmates themselves, giving a unique perspective on the foot soldiers of the drug trade.
Cocaine Prison premiered at the
Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017 and has won the
audience award at the Rencontres Cinémas d'Amérique Latine de Toulouse. In 2018, Ayala received a
Jaime Escalante Medal in a ceremony organized by the
Embassy of Bolivia in Washington, D.C. In 2020, Ayala was invited to join the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2021, Ayala's
Prison X a virtual reality animated experience premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival. In 2023,
La Lucha, premiered at the
Blackstar Film Festival and
SXSW Sydney. The documentary follows
La Caravana, a significant disability rights protest in Bolivia, and its role in establishing a monthly pension for people with disabilities —earned Ayala the
NYWIFT Award for Excellence in Documentary Directing. In 2025, Ayala was invited to participate in
Surreality, the world’s first large‑scale XR + AI art exhibition, organized by
HKUST’s Center for Metaverse and Computational Creativity at its Guangzhou campus. The exhibition opened on June 26, 2025, and featured more than 50 artists. Ayala presented an expanded version of
Las Awichas, alongside works that explore computational creativity rooted in Global South perspectives. She shared insights into recreating Indigenous mythological visuals via AI models and maintaining ethical awareness between cultural memory and technological mediation. == Art and technology projects ==