Coco Is Changing What a Young Woman in Hollywood Can Look Like

At 16, Coco Coloma is already winning awards, acting in features, directing her first short, and building a creative voice that Hollywood should pay close attention to.

There is a version of this story where being 16 and working in Hollywood is the whole story. Where every sentence leans on the word “young” like a lifeline. Coco doesn’t care much for that version. She’ll tell you her age if you ask, but she’d rather talk about the mermaid-at-children’s-parties script she just finished, or why Kathy Bates in Misery feels like a masterclass in total commitment, or why the best creative advice she ever got was simply to let yourself make bad work.

She has been telling stories since she was four years old, unintentionally cast in a school play because there weren’t enough students to fill the roles. The passion stuck. She kept making short films with friends and somewhere along the way became the kid on the school bus spinning horror stories so convincing that parents called her mother to complain. Horror and comedy are still the two genres she returns to most. It was never performance for performance’s sake. It was the specific pleasure of making people feel something, and the quick realization that she was great at it.

Growing up with two filmmaker parents meant the industry never felt like an impossible dream reserved for other people. It had texture and reality before it had glamour. She trained with Margie Haber and did intensive scene study with Tamra Meskimen because she understood early that loving something and being skilled at it are two very different approaches. That training is about to pay off on screen. She plays Lucy in Or Else, an upcoming feature currently in post-production and one of the first roles that will introduce her to audiences as an actor, not just a writer or director.The Script That Went Around the World

Something Old and Something New, Coco’s TV pilot, is the kind of premise that sounds simple until you sit with it. Two women swap bodies and lives. One is a single author in her 30s who has built her identity around the belief that romance and family are a kind of surrender. The other is a young woman from the 1800s for whom love and marriage are the entire architecture of a meaningful life. They are both wrong about each other. 

The script has won at the Vancouver Women Film Festival, the Oniros Film Awards in New York, the Rohip International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Awards, and the Cannes World Film Festival, and collected official selections from the New York Script Awards, the Hollywood Screenplay Contest, Female Voices Rock, and the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, among others. The awards keep arriving for a story Coco wrote as a teenager about a problem she had been turning over in her head since middle school.

“Growing up around social media and the entertainment industry, it’s really easy to compare your life to other people’s and assume theirs must be better,” she says. Her mother used to say the grass is greener, one of those phrases that sounds obvious until a story makes it concrete. Two characters actually living inside each other’s lives and discovering that the version they envied from the outside was never what they imagined. That’s the engine of the piece. It came from somewhere real.

Skydiving and Short Films

Her first short as director, Out Cold, follows Lana, a young mortuary assistant who discovers that a 13-year-old girl presumed dead has woken up mid-preparation. Lana smuggles her out of the morgue and follows her back to the rundown roadside motel where she died, slowly getting pulled into a violent and supernatural underworld that forces her to stop being a passive observer in her own life. The film hasn’t been widely released yet but it’s the kind of premise that stays with you.

Freshly finished, the film is currently under wraps
What she will talk about is what making it did to her. “Directing had always felt like something that belonged to other people, something I wasn’t capable of.” she remarked 

Then she made the film. “It’s kind of like skydiving,” she says. “You have to jump out of the plane and go for it.” What she found on the other side wasn’t mastery. It was the discovery that fear itself had been data. When something feels impossible, she’s realized that it usually just means she hasn’t learned enough about it yet. So she adapts and adjusts, then she does it.

She already has another short planned for this summer  and a feature in development called  “Are we the Same ?”December 2026.

What She Wants to Bring

Coco is drawn to people who don’t usually get to be the protagonist, unusual jobs, unexpected positions in life, characters who are strange or underappreciated or simply not the type Hollywood tends to follow.

She talks about the A24 and Neon movement with the fluency of someone who has been paying close attention. Stories that don’t follow the expected structure. Work that is weird and authentic rather than safe and calculated. “Don’t be shocking just to be shocking,” she says. “But if something feels authentic to you and you love it, take the risk of it being horrible and just make it.”

At 16, she has already jumped out of the plane a few times to kickstart her projects. There is every reason to believe she’ll keep jumping and soaring for more.