(b. El Paso,TX - Chihuahua, MX 1992) 

Mariana Góngora is a documentary filmmaker from Chihuahua, Mexico, and is based between the New Mexico region and Chihuahua. She commercially works as a producer, director, assistant director, and every now and then as a cinematographer.

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. 

Mariana was a 2023 fellow recipient for PBS Ignite Mentorships for Diverse Voices, allowing her to develop and improve her documentary skills.

In 2022, she was also a fellow recipient for Femme Frontera x Sundance Institute’s Film Laboratory and has earned seven best documentary awards for her co-direction of La Bi-vencia. 

She currently works as a consultant for an immersive and ethical VR film called GAWI. This project has been worked through collectiveness with the Rarámuri community from the Copper Canyon in Chihuahua.  Her most recent work includes La Bi-vencia (2022), of which she was the producer, co-director, drone operator, and editor and PBS’s Untold Earth nature documentary series with the episode of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico (2024).

As a producer and director of photography, Mariana participated in the Nicaraguan production Hasta Siempre (2019). She also became a field producer for Deliver Us From Ervil (2022), a podcast documentary produced by Novel. that was named one of the best podcasts of the year by Vulture.  Mariana was also an assistant producer for Liliana Sosa’s HBO docu-series God Save Texas (2023). 

Her work as a producer, video journalist, and documentarian has taken her to collaborate next to Agency Charlie and Democracy Now! in New York City, and TeleSUR English in Quito, Ecuador. She is currently working on developing and filming her interactive digital magazine The Doc Method. and developing her first feature doc “The War That Marked Us”.   

Mariana is passionate about the documentation through collective memory carried among those who grew up under the War On Drugs in Mexico, the borderland experience, and healing processes through filmmaking.