Alejandra Amarilla: Paraguayan Filmmaker, Activist and Mother

Some names reach the public through one famous marriage, and the rest of the story gets lost behind it. Alejandra Amarilla is one of those names. Most people who search for her do so because she was once married to Steve Nash, the Canadian basketball star. Yet her own work tells a different and fuller story: a Paraguayan filmmaker who helped bring a children’s orchestra made of recycled rubbish to the world’s attention, and a campaigner who has spent years speaking up for children, women and education in her home country.

Among the many celebrity stories that begin with a famous husband, this one is worth reading to the end. Alejandra Amarilla was born in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1974, and she built a life that crossed two continents, two languages and two very different worlds — the quiet streets of the Paraguayan capital and the bright lights of the NBA. She raised three children, made a documentary that won awards around the world, and kept her private life as private as she could while the press picked over the end of her marriage.

This article looks at what is actually known about Alejandra Amarilla, separates solid facts from the claims that keep getting repeated online without proof, and explains where she is believed to be now. Where a detail cannot be checked, it is flagged as such, because a real person’s life should not be filled in with guesswork.

Alejandra Amarilla Quick Facts

• Full name: Alejandra Amarilla
• Born: Reported as 1974, Asunción, Paraguay — exact date not publicly confirmed
• Nationality: Paraguayan-American
• Known for: Filmmaker, activist and philanthropist; creator and executive producer of Landfill Harmonic
• Notable works: Landfill Harmonic (2015), Unleashing Creativity (2009)
• Education: Reported to have studied marketing and advertising at Universidad Americana de Paraguay
• Former spouse: Steve Nash, Canadian basketball player and coach (married 2005, divorced 2011)
• Children: Twin daughters Lola and Bella, and son Matteo
• Home: Reported to live in Los Angeles, California
• Public profile: Private; no confirmed interviews, memoir or public social media in her own name

Who Is Alejandra Amarilla?

Alejandra Amarilla is a Paraguayan-American filmmaker, activist and philanthropist. She is best known as the creator and executive producer of Landfill Harmonic, the 2015 documentary about the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, a group of children in Paraguay who play instruments built from rubbish. The film premiered at the South by Southwest festival in March 2015, won an audience award there, and was later shown on CBS’s 60 Minutes, NPR and CNN.

She is also known publicly as the former wife of Steve Nash, the two-time NBA Most Valuable Player. The two met in New York in 2001, married in 2005, and had three children together before separating in 2010 and divorcing in 2011. The timing of that split — Nash announced the separation a day after their third child was born — made headlines around the world and has followed Alejandra Amarilla ever since.

That is the short version, and it does her a disservice. Before the marriage, and long after it, Alejandra Amarilla worked on film and charity projects tied to Paraguay, the country she left as a young woman and never stopped caring about. She has described her aim in simple terms: to use film to give a voice to people who are not heard, and to draw attention to poverty and children’s causes in her native country. The orchestra of Cateura was the perfect subject for that aim, and the film she helped make carried its story from a landfill outside Asunción to cinemas and television screens across the world.

Early Life in Asunción

Alejandra Amarilla was born in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1974. The year is widely reported across biography sites, but her exact date of birth has never been publicly confirmed by an official record or by Amarilla herself, so it should be treated as reported rather than proven. Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, sits on the banks of the Paraguay River, and it is a city where Spanish and Guaraní live side by side in everyday speech. Growing up there in the 1970s and 1980s meant growing up in a country that was still finding its way after decades of dictatorship, and in a culture where family, faith and music run deep.

Little is publicly known about her parents or her childhood home, and that is not an accident. Alejandra Amarilla has kept her family background out of the press, and the biography sites that claim to know details about her parents or siblings offer nothing that can be checked. What can be said with confidence is that she grew up in Paraguay, that she was educated there, and that the country stayed at the centre of her work long after she moved away.

Paraguay in those years was a place of sharp contrasts. It was one of the poorest countries in South America, yet it had a rich musical tradition. Children learned to play in community bands, and music was one of the few things that cost nothing. That background matters, because the story that would later define Alejandra Amarilla’s career — children making music from rubbish — could only have come from a place like Cateura, on the edge of Asunción.

Education and the Move to the United States

Alejandra Amarilla is reported to have studied marketing and advertising at the Universidad Americana de Paraguay, enrolling in the late 1990s. The dates given by one biography site are 1997 to 1999, but no degree or graduation record has been published, so the detail should be read as reported rather than confirmed. What is clear is that her early training was in communication and marketing, not in film school, and that she came to filmmaking through charity work rather than through a studio career.

At some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s she moved to the United States. The exact year is not publicly documented. New York was where her life changed: it was there, in Manhattan in 2001, that she met Steve Nash, then a rising star with the Dallas Mavericks. The move also put her in a position to work on the kind of projects she cared about, with access to American film and charity networks that a filmmaker in Asunción would have found hard to reach.

The move did not cut her ties to Paraguay. If anything, distance sharpened them. Much of her later work was aimed back at the country she had left, and at the children growing up in places like Cateura, the landfill community outside Asunción where her most famous film was set.

Meeting Steve Nash

Alejandra Amarilla met Steve Nash in Manhattan in 2001. Nash was a Canadian point guard, then playing for the Dallas Mavericks, and he was on his way to becoming one of the best players of his generation. They were together for several years before marrying, and their first children arrived before the wedding: twin daughters Lola and Bella were born on 14 October 2004 in Phoenix, Arizona, where Nash was then playing for the Phoenix Suns.

The couple married on 11 June 2005. For the next five years, Alejandra Amarilla lived the life of an NBA wife: moving with the team, raising young children, and appearing at games and charity events. Nash won the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award in 2005 and again in 2006, and his fame grew with each season. His wife, by contrast, stayed out of the spotlight as much as she could, and the press knew little about her beyond her name and her Paraguayan background.

During those years, she also began the work that would define her. In 2009 she co-directed Unleashing Creativity, a documentary connected to Free Arts of Arizona, a nonprofit that brings arts programmes to children who have faced abuse, neglect or homelessness. It was a small film, but it set the pattern for everything that followed: film used as a tool to help children, not as a route to fame.

Landfill Harmonic: The Film That Made Her Name

The project that changed Alejandra Amarilla’s life began with a story from home. In Cateura, a community built on a landfill outside Asunción, a music teacher named Favio Chávez had started a music school for local children. There were more children than instruments, and instruments cost money that nobody in Cateura had. So Chávez and a local instrument maker known as Cola began building violins, cellos and flutes from the rubbish around them: oil cans, scrap metal, wood, bottle caps and old cutlery. The result was the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, a group of children playing real music on instruments made entirely from trash.

Alejandra Amarilla discovered the story and decided it had to be filmed. She created the project and served as executive producer, bringing on producer Juliana Penaranda-Loftus and directors Brad Allgood and Graham Townsley to make it. The film, Landfill Harmonic, follows Chávez and his young musicians as their story goes viral and the orchestra is swept from a landfill in Paraguay onto world stages, with all the excitement and strain that sudden fame brings.

The film premiered at the South by Southwest festival on 18 March 2015 and won the Audience Award in the “24 Beats Per Second” section. It went on to win audience awards at festivals including AFI Fest, and it was shown on HBO in the United States. Coverage followed from CBS’s 60 Minutes, NPR and CNN, and the orchestra itself toured the world. A Kickstarter campaign for the film raised more than $214,000 from nearly 5,000 supporters, a sign of how far the story travelled.

Landfill Harmonic opened in Paraguay in August 2016, more than a year after its festival premiere. For Alejandra Amarilla, the film was the fulfilment of the aim she had described years earlier: to use film to give a voice to the voiceless and to draw attention to poverty and children’s causes in her native country. The children of Cateura did not need pity, and the film never offered it. It showed them as musicians, and it let the music speak.

The 2010 Separation

The end of Alejandra Amarilla’s marriage to Steve Nash was one of the most talked-about celebrity splits of 2010, and not for happy reasons. On 12 November 2010, she gave birth to the couple’s third child, a son named Matteo Joel Nash. The next day, Nash released a statement announcing that the marriage was over. He called it a “bittersweet moment” and said the couple had been living separately for several months.

The timing shocked fans and the press alike. Within days, rumours were flying about the reasons for the split, including unproven claims about the paternity of the new baby. Those rumours were never confirmed as fact. In 2011, Alejandra Amarilla issued a statement through her lawyers denying them, and no credible source has ever supported them. The honest position is that the private reasons for the break-up were never fully explained in public, and the gossip that filled the gap should not be repeated as if it were history.

The divorce was finalised in 2011, according to most reports, although some sources give 2010 as the year — a confusion that comes from mixing up the separation announcement with the final decree. What followed was a long and difficult custody dispute over the three children. Nash signed with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2012, while Alejandra Amarilla and the children were living in Phoenix, and the question of where the children should live became a court matter. The case was eventually resolved in the Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona, with a settlement reached in September 2013.

Through all of this, Alejandra Amarilla said very little in public. She did not give tell-all interviews, and she did not use the press to fight her corner. That silence has frustrated gossip writers, but it has also protected her children, who were six and newborn when the marriage ended. Whatever the courts decided, the three children — Lola, Bella and Matteo — have remained the centre of her life, and every reliable account of her since the divorce describes her first as a devoted mother.

Philanthropy and Advocacy

Long before Landfill Harmonic, and long after it, Alejandra Amarilla worked on charity and advocacy projects. Her focus has been consistent: women’s rights, education, environmental sustainability, and the welfare of children. She has supported charitable organisations working on those causes, and she has used her public profile — such as it is — to draw attention to them rather than to herself.

She is also credited as a co-producer of Somos Una América (We Are One America), a documentary about the struggles of Latin American communities affected by poverty and social inequality. The credit is reported by a small number of sources, and the film is far less documented than Landfill Harmonic, so it should be read as reported rather than firmly established. Even so, it fits the same pattern: a film about ordinary Latin Americans, made to be seen by people who might otherwise never think about them.

Her philanthropy is not the kind that comes with galas and photo calls. She has kept her charitable work quiet, and much of it is known only through the films themselves and through the organisations she has worked with. That low profile is a choice, and it is in keeping with everything else about her public life. She does not seem interested in being a celebrity. She seems interested in the work.

Life Today

Alejandra Amarilla is reported to live in Los Angeles, California, where she has been based for many years. She has not publicly confirmed a new marriage or partner since her divorce from Steve Nash, and no reliable source names one. Her three children are now grown or nearly grown: Lola and Bella, born in 2004, are in their early twenties, and Matteo, born in 2010, is a teenager.

She keeps a low profile. There is no confirmed memoir, no regular round of interviews, and no public social media account that can be verified as hers. One biography site lists an Instagram handle, but it has not been confirmed, and it would be wrong to treat it as her official account. What is known is that she continues to work on film and charity projects, and that her name still comes up whenever the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura is written about — which, a decade after Landfill Harmonic, it still regularly is.

Steve Nash, meanwhile, married Lilla Frederick, a former volleyball player, in 2016, and they have two children of their own. The two families have moved on, and the custody battles of the early 2010s are long over. Alejandra Amarilla’s story now stands on its own, and it is a better story than the one the headlines told in 2010: a woman from Asunción who saw children making music from rubbish and decided the world should hear them.

Common Confusions About Alejandra Amarilla

Because so much of what is written about Alejandra Amarilla comes from low-quality biography sites that copy each other, several errors and mix-ups keep circulating. The most common ones are worth clearing up.

When did the divorce happen? Nash announced the separation in November 2010, a day after Matteo was born. Most reliable reports say the divorce was finalised in 2011. Some sites give 2010 as the divorce year, but that confuses the separation announcement with the final decree.

Was she born in 1974? That year is widely reported, and it would make her 52 in 2026. But her exact date of birth has not been confirmed by an official record or by Amarilla herself, so the year should be treated as widely reported rather than proven.

What is her net worth? Some sites give a figure of around $1 million, supposedly tied to her film work and her divorce settlement. No credible financial source supports that number, and it varies from site to site. There is no reliable public record of her wealth, and no figure should be quoted as fact.

Did she direct Landfill Harmonic? No. The film was directed by Brad Allgood and Graham Townsley. Alejandra Amarilla created the project and served as executive producer, which means she found the story, drove it forward and helped fund it. Some sites describe her as the director, which is wrong.

Was she a motivational speaker? One biography site describes her early career as motivational speaking. No other source supports that claim, and it does not fit with her documented work in film and charity. It is best treated as unproven.

Is she the same person as the author of the same name? There are other people called Alejandra Amarilla, and details about them should not be mixed into her story. The filmmaker and activist described here is the Paraguayan-born former wife of Steve Nash and the executive producer of Landfill Harmonic.

Frequently Asked Questions About Alejandra Amarilla

Who is Alejandra Amarilla?

Alejandra Amarilla is a Paraguayan-American filmmaker, activist and philanthropist, best known as the creator and executive producer of the 2015 documentary Landfill Harmonic, about the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura in Paraguay. She is also known as the former wife of basketball star Steve Nash and the mother of their three children.

How old is Alejandra Amarilla?

Her birth year is widely reported as 1974, which would make her 52 in 2026, but her exact date of birth has not been confirmed by an official record or by Amarilla herself, so the figure should be treated as reported rather than certain.

What is Landfill Harmonic about?

Landfill Harmonic is a 2015 documentary about the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, a group of children from a landfill community outside Asunción, Paraguay, who play instruments built from recycled rubbish under their teacher Favio Chávez. Alejandra Amarilla created the project and served as executive producer. The film premiered at South by Southwest in March 2015 and won an audience award there.

Who are Alejandra Amarilla’s children?

She has three children with Steve Nash: twin daughters Lola and Bella, born on 14 October 2004, and a son, Matteo Joel Nash, born on 12 November 2010.

When did Alejandra Amarilla and Steve Nash split up?

Nash announced their separation in November 2010, a day after their son Matteo was born, saying they had been living separately for several months. The divorce was finalised in 2011, and a custody settlement was reached in 2013.

Where does Alejandra Amarilla live now?

She is reported to live in Los Angeles, California, where she has been based for many years. She keeps a low public profile and continues to work on film and charity projects.

What else has Alejandra Amarilla worked on?

Before Landfill Harmonic, she co-directed Unleashing Creativity (2009), a documentary connected to Free Arts of Arizona, a nonprofit bringing arts programmes to vulnerable children. She has also worked on advocacy for women’s rights, education and environmental sustainability.

Conclusion

Alejandra Amarilla’s name first reached most people through a marriage, and then through the painful way that marriage ended. That is a shame, because her own work is the more interesting story. A woman born in Asunción in 1974 saw children in a landfill community making music from rubbish, and she spent years turning that sight into a film the whole world could see. Landfill Harmonic did not just win awards. It gave the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura a stage, and it gave its young musicians a chance to be heard as musicians, not as a curiosity.

She has kept her private life private, raised three children through a very public divorce, and carried on with the charity and film work that mattered to her before fame ever touched her. That is a life worth knowing on its own terms, not as a footnote to someone else’s career. For readers who want to check the basic facts about the film and the orchestra, a general reference is a good place to start.