Maria Agui Carter

Maria Agui Carter is an award-winning fiction and documentary writer and director, founder of Iguana Films, and Professor at Emerson College. Of Chinese, Indigenous South American, and Latinx descent, she grew up undocumented in New York City and graduated from Harvard on scholarship. Formerly a staff producer at PBS’s flagship station WGBH producing national, prime time documentaries, she has won George Peabody Gardner, Warren, and Rockefeller awards. Recent works include the fiction/documentary hybrid feature REBEL: Loreta Velazquez, Secret Soldier of the American Civil War (National PBS and Amazon Prime), winner of a 2014 Erik Barnouw award for best historical films in America; and the PBS series Latina SCIGIRLS, nominated for a 2019 Daytime Emmy award. Maria has advocated for diverse voices in media for many years.  She founded the only residential retreat for women screenwriters and film directors of color in the US, the ARC (Artist Retreat Center) and she is the former Board Chair of NALIP. A long-time member of the Writer’s Guild, she also serves on the Writer’s Guild of America Committee for Inclusion and Equity. Her interests range widely, from American history to the history of Latinx and Latin Americans, Latin American and US BIPOC literature, and science, education, and anthropology. She speaks, reads, and writes Spanish fluently. She believes stories change the world.