Maria Agui Carter

María Agui Carter is a writer, a director, and a Producer-In- Residence at Emerson College. A former staff producer at WGBH TV in Boston, and the President of Iguana Films, LLC, she is a George Peabody Gardner, Warren, and Rockefeller award-winner, and has served as a visiting artist and scholar at Tulane, Brandeis and Harvard.

She is passionate about using media storytelling to inspire social change and specializes in visually arresting and complex storytelling, working in both English and Spanish language films and transmedia. She is an advocate for diversity in media, and believes in media’s power to effect social justice. She is a trustee of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), founder of the Artist Retreat Center for diverse women screenwriters and documentary directors, serves on the Diversity Coalition of the Writer’s Guild of America, East (WGAE), and is authoring a White Paper on inclusive excellence in media.

Over a dozen of her films (written, produced, directed by credit) have shown on PBS, on cable and in film festivals. She developed, with Executive Producer Jill Janows, the Culture Shock series on PBS, which was nominated for an IDA award for limited series, and wrote, produced, and directed the closing film of the series, The Devil’s Music, on censorship of Jazz and Hip Hop, hailed by the New York Times as a documentary that “addressing the complex interaction of race and class… engages viewers in a conversation as vigorous as the art it chronicles.”

Recent completed projects include: the documentary feature Rebel (writer/director/producer), winner of an Erik Barnouw award for the best historical films in America and broadcast on national PBS; the play Fourteen Freight Trains (writer), performed at Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; and the opening episode of the upcoming 2018 season of SciGirls Latina, a PBS broadcast and trans-media series (director).

Ms. Agui Carter’s current project is a magical realist theatrical feature, inspired by her experience of growing up undocumented in America and graduating from Harvard. The Secret Life of La Mariposa is a modern re-imagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis centered on a teen girl with a special connection to the Monarch butterflies of her native Mexico. An impact campaign on immigrant girls’ rights and the environment will accompany the film.