DOCS, METHODS, PRODUCTION, FILM
DOCS, METHODS, PRODUCTION, FILM
Award-winning Mexican-American migrant, documentarian, producer, and writer; currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, her 2022 short documentary LA BI-VENCIA won 7 awards for best documentary and directorial debut at 22 festivals. As a borderland woman, Mariana explores the shapes and forms of identities that emerge from multinational experiences by searching and expanding new ways of exposing stories within the documentary formats, such as archival, abstractism, animation, and memory. Her more recent work as a director is PBS’s short film documentary WHISPERS OF LA SIERRA, which tells the story about a forcibly displaced indigenous family from Coloradas De La Virgen, Chihuahua. The film will premiere in February 2026, through PBS Digital Studios. She has also directed and produced short films such as PBS’s Terra channel: WHY IS NASA INTERESTED IN THIS UPSIDE DOWN CAVE?, which approach around 290,000 views; ARGENTINA’S COMMUNITY NETWORKS, NEW YORK’S HOMEWORK GAPS, and GERMANY’S CALM THROUGH THE CRISIS. She navigates stories, mismatched time zones, and a growing pile of notebooks she promises to sort out someday. She’s also pursuing a graduate degree in Documentary Journalism, adding yet another layer to the borders, films, and identities that move through her.
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(Chihuahua, MX - El Paso, TX 1992)
Mariana Góngora is a documentary filmmaker from Chihuahua, Mexico, currently based between Argentina and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. She works across roles including producer, director, assistant director, and occasionally cinematographer.
Rooted in the experience of growing up in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands during the War on Drugs, Mariana’s work explores how identity, memory, and silence are shaped by militarized territories. Through documentary practice, she experiments with hybrid forms that blend archival material, abstraction, personal testimony, and elements of magical realism to create spaces where personal and collective histories intersect.
Mariana was a 2023 fellow of the PBS Ignite Mentorships for Diverse Voices and a 2022 fellow of the Femme Frontera x Sundance Institute Documentary Lab. Her short documentary La Bi-vencia (2022), which she co-directed and produced, received seven Best Documentary awards.
Her recent work includes directing This Fabric Knows. (2026) for PBS Voices, as well as producing and directing for the PBS nature series Untold Earth with the episode on Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico (2024). She previously served as a consultant on the immersive VR project GAWI, developed collaboratively with the Rarámuri community in the Copper Canyon of Chihuahua, Mexico.
As a producer and director of photography, Mariana participated in the Nicaraguan feature Hasta Siempre (2019). She later worked as a field producer on the documentary podcast Deliver Us From Ervil (2022), produced by Novel. and named one of the best podcasts of the year by Vulture, and as an assistant producer on Liliana Sosa’s HBO docu-series God Save Texas (2023).
Her current feature documentary project, Before You Die, You’ll Know Your Absences, is an intimate portrait of fatherhood and the inherited logics of authority shaped by life in militarized border territories. The project was selected to participate in FIDBA’s development program (2025) in Brazil and is currently part of the FICCI x Netflix Fund for Creative Equity Ópera Prima Lab and the SANFIC Industry development program.
Mariana’s work is driven by an interest in how filmmaking can confront silence, archive the present, and reclaim collective memory in regions shaped by violence, migration, and militarization.