Being 15 Hugo Santander wrote and directed Intrigue at Saint Cross, a play very much conceived under the influence of Agatha Cristie's work. In 1985 he staged Nicolas Bela's Silver Nails, a tour de force that granted him the best-direction award at the 4th Theatre Festival of Bucaramanga. Encouraged by this premature success he moved to Bogotá in 1986, where he pursued a bachelor's degree in Social Communication at the Universidad Javeriana. During the following years he wrote film and theatre reviews for the monthly magazine Consigna; he also confounded and directed two theatre groups: El Perchel and Kallias.  In 1991 he was appointed as principal director of  Arte Facto Teatro, a group with which he staged Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1991), Ionesco's The Lesson (1992) and Bernard Shaw's Candida (1993) as well as two of his own plays: Cortes & Moctezuma (1992) and Hermione (1994).

Cortes & Moctezuma © Arte Facto Teatro 1992

In 1994 he moved to the Philadelphia, where he wrote and directed Hamlet Unbound, a free film adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, he moved to Portugal in 1998, to assume his post as Assistant Professor of Acting, Screenwriting and Creative Writing at the  Universidad Catolica Portuguesa. In 2000 he wrote and directed his 1-hour monologue Norida's First Date, translated from Spanish to Portuguese by Hélder Sousa.  Soon after he moved to England, where he lectured at the University of Salford on Media Management, Acting for the Camera and Acting for Shakespeare, a course that included the direction and staging of his adaptation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens.

La Lección © Arte Facto Teatro 1993

In 2003 he wrote and directed his play Kennedy's Crimes at the University of Manchester. A Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American  Studies at the University of Manchester. He lives currently in Bucaramanga.

Cortes & Moctezuma © Arte Facto Teatro 1992

La Lección © Arte Facto Teatro 1993