Juana Acosta, the Colombian actress who waited thirty years to dance again

Juana Acosta

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 28, 1976 Cali, Colombia
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Perfect Strangers, Carlos, The Liberator
Awards	Fotogramas de Plata · FIPA d'Or · Premios Macondo · Premios India Catalina

Directors keep handing Juana Acosta the same kind of woman. A businesswoman who survives an explosion on her own yacht and walks back into the family boardroom; a wife at a dinner party who drinks her way through a game of reading text messages aloud. She has said she prefers it that way: “I like strong characters,” she told the Colombian daily El País this year, and her credits back her up, more than forty films and a long run of series that made her one of the few Latin American actresses working steadily at the centre of Spanish screen drama. The more revealing part of her story sits outside them. For half her life she did not dance, and when she finally went back to it, the subject was the phone call that had made her stop.

She grew up in Cali, in the Valle del Cauca. Her parents separated when she was six, and she and her sister Valentina, who is now an actress in Colombia, were raised by their mother, who ran a travel agency. From the age of six she trained in contemporary dance at the María Sanford academy. At sixteen, already dressed for class, she answered a call telling her that her father, Álvaro Acosta, had been murdered. She did not dance again for thirty years.

Born Juana Lucrecia Acosta Restrepo on 28 November 1976, she studied fine arts before turning to acting, and Colombian audiences first knew her from late-1990s television: Mascarada, La dama del pantano, La reina de Queens, a lead in Es mejor ser rico que pobre, and Sergio Cabrera’s comedy Golpe de estadio. Then she left. In Madrid she enrolled at Juan Carlos Corazza’s acting school, and around 2000 she settled in Spain for good. A teacher there, Catalina Lladó, told her the diminutive did not suit her: “Juanita doesn’t fit you, Juana does. It’s more forceful.” In Colombia people still call her Juanita, and her identity card still says so.

The Spanish years started small. She took supporting parts in Policías, en el corazón de la calle and Hospital Central, where she played the resident Sofía Carrillo, and ensemble roles in Los 2 lados de la cama, Diario de un skin and A golpes. Her breakout came through Europe more than through Spain. Olivier Assayas cast her in Carlos, his miniseries about the terrorist known as the Jackal. In Crematorio, the Canal+ adaptation of Rafael Chirbes’s novel, she earned an Actors Union nomination. In the Venezuelan-Spanish Libertador she played Manuela Sáenz opposite Édgar Ramírez’s Simón Bolívar, and in the French thriller 11.6 she worked alongside François Cluzet. Television gave her the role that fixed her public image: Sara Ortega in Velvet, a businesswoman ahead of her time.

The parts that argued hardest for her range drew less attention. In the French television film Sanctuaire she played Yoyes, the ETA leader killed by her former comrades after she left the organisation, and won best actress at the FIPA festival in Biarritz. In Jacques Toulemonde’s Anna, shot in Colombia, she played a woman with bipolar disorder and took the Premio Macondo; she has said that film marked a before and an after in her career. Then came the commercial peak. Álex de la Iglesia wanted real couples for Perfectos desconocidos, his Spanish remake of the Italian Perfetti sconosciuti, and cast Acosta with her partner Ernesto Alterio. The film had taken 18.9 million euros at the Spanish box office by early 2018, and her drunken dinner-table collapse, a scene she says demanded real risk, won her the Fotogramas de Plata for best actress. A year earlier she had starred in 7 años, Netflix‘s first Spanish original film.

That run also sealed a narrower version of her. The composure that sells Velvet and Medusa is the same composure the fashion pages write about after every red carpet, and Spanish cinema has offered her more places in ensembles than leads. In a quarter century of work in the country, the Goya Academy has nominated her once, as best supporting actress for El inconveniente in 2021. The roles that test her most have tended to arrive from the margins, like Imanol Uribe’s Llegaron de noche, in which she carried the story of Lucía, a witness to the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter by the Salvadoran army. Her biggest platform hits of those years, Netflix’s Harlan Coben adaptation El inocente and Prime Video‘s La templanza, put her inside large casts.

The turn came on stage. Thirty years after she stopped dancing, she created El perdón with the choreographer Chevi Muraday, an experimental piece that combines acting and dance to work through her father’s murder and the effort of forgiving it. It ran for more than eighty performances in Spain, and in early 2023 audiences in Cali gave it a standing ovation. That year she also received the India Catalina award for her international career.

Her recent work runs on two tracks. In Colombia, Netflix’s Medusa cast her as Bárbara Hidalgo, about to take over her family’s conglomerate on the Caribbean coast when an explosion on her yacht leaves everyone believing she is dead, opposite Manolo Cardona, a friend she describes as a brother and her screen partner since El cártel de los sapos. The series reached Netflix’s global most-watched lists in 2025, and its second season, twelve episodes, arrived on 30 September 2026. In Spain she joined two SkyShowtime thrillers from Sergio Cánovas: Matices in 2025 and El homenaje, released in April 2026 and built around the eightieth birthday of a patriarch played by Eusebio Poncela. In the latter her daughter, Lola Alterio, made her acting debut as the adoptive daughter of Acosta’s character. In July she returned to dance in Bacanal, Muraday’s ritual piece with text by Juan Carlos Rubio, at the Roman theatre of the Mérida Classical Theatre Festival.

Acosta and Ernesto Alterio, whom she met in Madrid, were together for about fifteen years; their daughter Lola was born in 2006. They separated in 2018 and have stayed close, attending Lola’s premiere side by side.

They will also share the screen again. Perfectos conocidos, a spin-off of the 2017 hit directed by Javier Fesser, brings back Ana and Antonio as a couple cut off from everything in the Canary Islands, and Universal has it on the Spanish release calendar for 1 January 2027. The actress who first played Ana as the guest losing control of the evening now gets to show, a decade on, what that woman became.