Teodora Ana Mihai was born in Bucharest, Romania, under Ceausescu’s regime. In 1989 she came to Belgium and was reunited with her parents, who had fled the year before.
In junior high, the opportunity arose to study in California and Teodora completed the last two years of high school at the French American International High School in San Francisco. Soon, inspired by her father’s previous passion for photography and the artistic environment of San Francisco she found that she wanted to explore reality through image and sound. It all started with film and video workshops geared toward teenagers, which led to a true passion for the seventh art.
Teodora went on to study film at Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York. Upon returning to Belgium, she first started working in the industry as a script supervisor and assistant director, followed by a stint in the TV industry. However, the desire to work on her own projects was so strong that she decided to shift focus and dedicate herself entirely to this. Her films take on the challenge of striking a balance between social relevance and audio-visual poetry.
After directing the award-winning documentary "Waiting for August"—telling the story of Georgiana, a Romanian teenage girl who is left to take care offor her six siblings, as her mother has to work abroad to get by—which was nominated for the European Film Awards in 2014, Teodora became a member of the European Film Academy. She continues her film work with enthusiasm, currently developing with her Belgian based company One for the Road bvba, two features set in Mexico, in collaboration with Mexican writer Habacuc Antonio De Rosario: "La Civil", which tells the story of a mother’s extraordinary transformation from housewife to vengeful militant, after her teenage daughter is murdered by the violent drug cartel operating in her town and "Los Olvidables", a project about two teenage siblings growing up on the Mexico-US border, after losing their parents in the drug war.