Colombia Wins 11 of 25 Premios A Voz in Bogotá. Here’s Every Winner, From Audiobooks to Audio Description
Bogotá handed out 25 statues for the spoken voice this month, and the list reads like a working voice actor’s week: a commercial demo, an audiobook, an e-learning course, a podcast, a documentary, a radio station ID and audio description. Colombia took 11 of them. Here’s every winner of the 2026 Premios de la Academia de la Voz A Voz, with their category and country, and what a few of them had to say.
The sixth Premios A Voz were presented on the night of Saturday, October 10, at the Gimnasio Moderno in Bogotá, as the high point of the seventh Festival Viva Voz, the Ibero-American voice festival run by A Voz Academia de Expresión y Doblaje, a Bogotá voice and dubbing school. The organizers say this year’s call drew 326 entries from 18 countries, and the winners came from seven of them: Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Chile and the United States.
Twenty-two statues went to working professionals and three to students. Entries were judged without names attached. As the organizers put it on their nominations page, each piece arrived “identified only by a number.”
Every winner, category by category
The full list, as published by the Festival Viva Voz. Category names are translated from Spanish; where a winner has their own website, it’s linked once.
Professional
- Best commercial voice demo: Nicolás Ortiz Rodríguez, Colombia
- Best dubbing voice demo: David Santana, Dominican Republic
- Best audiobook voice demo: Yaryt Mazo Agudelo, Colombia
- Best jingle voice demo: Laura Villalta, United States
- Best TV promo voice demo: Josefina Hernández, Dominican Republic
- Best national voice in Latin American dubbing, Colombia (Gustavo Nieto Roa Award): Carlos Jiménez, Colombia
- Best international commercial voice: Carlos Javier Méndez, Colombia
- Best international voice in Latin American Spanish dubbing: Stephanie Preller, Chile
- Best international audiobook voice: Cristina Tenorio, Mexico
- Best international voice for TV promos and channel IDs: Johanny Hernández Ramírez, Costa Rica
- Best international documentary narration voice: Yolanda “Yopa” Ponce, Mexico
- Best international voice for radio and station IDs: José Luis Paz, Ecuador
- Best international original animated character voice (not dubbing): Zonia Rocha, Colombia
- Best international voice for jingles or musical dubbing: Beto Castillo, Mexico
- Best international podcast voice: Laura Mendoza, Colombia
- Best international voice for public speaking, speaker or presenter: Viviana Arreola, Mexico
- Best international voice for e-learning, corporate and institutional: Mariela Baltodano, Costa Rica
- Best sound production of an ad or campaign: Jairo Paz
- Best voice direction in a series, ad campaign or film: Claudia Osejo, Colombia
- Best international child or youth voice: Mariana Rojas Acevedo, Colombia
- Best international voice in a foreign language: Juan Montalvo, Ecuador
- Best international voice in audio description: María Victoria Coto Ameneiros, Colombia
Students
- Best dubbing performance, book or demo: Mariana Ramírez Fernández, Costa Rica
- Best commercial voice performance, book or demo: Valeria Barberi, Colombia
- Best creative voice piece (manifesto, poem, micro story, narration): Miyer Pérez, Colombia
Congratulations to all of them. The organizers closed their own announcement the same way, calling the winners’ work “the best proof that the voice is a craft you study, practice and turn into art.”
Why this list looks like a working voice actor’s week
Most voice awards lean on film, TV and games. This one gives as much room to the jobs that pay most voice actors’ bills. Five of the professional statues are for demos alone, judged as the calling cards they are: commercial, dubbing, audiobook, jingle and TV promo. Then there’s e-learning and corporate narration, radio imaging, channel IDs, podcasts and presenting, each with its own category.
Cristina Tenorio’s audiobook win and Mariela Baltodano’s e-learning award sit on the same list as Stephanie Preller’s prize for Latin American Spanish dubbing. For anyone who spends more days recording compliance modules than cartoons, that’s a fair picture of the work.
Mariela Baltodano's winner card for e-learning, corporate and institutional voice. Image: Academia de la Voz A Voz
Two categories stand out. Audio description, the narration that tells blind and partially sighted viewers what’s happening on screen, has its own statue, won by María Victoria Coto Ameneiros of Colombia. And voice direction gets one too, won by Claudia Osejo, a reminder that somebody on the other side of the glass shapes most of the reads that win prizes.
The student category was crowded. Costa Rica’s Delfino.cr reports that 84 people entered the three student categories and 13 reached the final.
Costa Rica’s student winner wants to take dubbing home
Mariana Ramírez Fernández is 23, from Heredia, and finished a journalism degree in 2025 before enrolling in voice training at A Voz. Her student prize for a dubbing demo made her the third Costa Rican woman to win at these awards, after Mariela Baltodano and Carolina Solano, according to Delfino.cr.
Mariana Ramírez's student winner card for her dubbing demo. Image: Academia de la Voz A Voz
She told the outlet who coached her. “During that specialization my tutor was Miguel Botello, who does the voice of Mr. Burns in The Simpsons,” she said. She also explained who sat on the anonymous panel: “The judges were casting directors, production agencies and dubbing actors. They scored the performance, the variety, the mix.”
VoiceEditSuiteNewThe audio editor that learns how you breathe.Learns from numbers, never your audio. Never used to train AI.See how it worksShe’s been building an audience online by giving her knowledge away rather than selling it. “As I’m at a development stage in my career, I don’t feel it’s right to charge for my knowledge, so on social media I talk about tips for performance, things they don’t tell you in dubbing, curious things,” she said.
Her bigger goal is about where the work goes. Costa Rica has dubbing studios, she said, but “since they aren’t well known in the industry, the really big projects don’t reach them.” Her plan is to go where the work is first. “I want to go to Mexico to report in, to knock on doors, because even though I want to bring it here, dubbing, I know that to do it I can’t stay,” she said. In Mexican dubbing, reporting in means visiting studios in person to let directors know you’re available.
Goku’s voice opened the week
The awards closed a festival week that ran workshops in Bogotá from October 5 and a professional program from October 8. The Friday morning opened with Mario Castañeda, the Latin American voice of Goku in Dragon Ball. Sitting center stage, he looked back on his career. “It’s been a wonderful journey of 29 years, which started with a dream. I want to be an actor,” he said, according to the festival’s own report. Then, more modestly: “I was just working. I never dreamed it. I’m not an example of anything.”
Mario Arvizu, the Latin American Spanish voice of Skipper in Madagascar, followed with a talk that took in radio, commercial voice over, dubbing and union leadership. He started at 18 in a radio booth in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua, and reached dubbing at 28. Later the two Marios and Mario Filio, the Latin American voice of Goofy and King Julien, played a game of truth or act on stage, directed by Gaby Cárdenas.
The truth or act panel with Mario Castañeda, Mario Arvizu and Mario Filio, directed by Gaby Cárdenas. Image: Festival Viva Voz
The festival’s magazine, Voces que transforman, collects nine interviews with that week’s guests, and some of the sharpest lines are about the craft rather than the fame. Arvizu’s advice: “The day you think you’ve made it, you’ll be wrong and you’ll make mistakes. So never stop fighting and never stop preparing.” Sara Pantoja, who has taught spoken voice in Chile for 31 years, described what she hears from new students: “What I hear most is fear: lots of fears, lots of insecurity, not daring to have a voice of your own.”
Saturday’s program, before the red carpet and the ceremony, included sessions on vocal health, AI in the voice industry and casting. Sunday closed with morning workshops and a networking lunch.
For more voice prizes this autumn, see Voice Over Herald’s lists of the VOX Awards and South African Voiceover Awards winners and every SONARR winner.
Sources: Festival Viva Voz (winners list, October 10, 2026; nominations, September 14, 2026; Friday program report, October 9, 2026; magazine Voces que transforman); Delfino.cr (October 23, 2026). Quotations from Spanish-language sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: Academia de la Voz A Voz / Festival Viva Voz.
Lee este artículo en español: Colombia gana 11 de los 25 Premios A Voz en Bogotá. Todos los ganadores, de los audiolibros a la audiodescripción
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