Margarita Martinez is a Colombian documentary filmmaker. She received her masters’ degree in Journalism and International Affairs from Columbia University in 1998 and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2009. Martinez started her career at NBC in New York in 1998. She moved back to Bogota in 1999 to work for the Associated Press. For the next seven years, she covered Colombia´s internal conflict, moving between rebel camps and paramilitary strongholds. Her first film, La Sierra, about paramilitary gangs in Medellin is still one of the most widely seen in Colombia. It was nominated to the Independent Spirit Award in Los Angeles in 2006, and was seen in PBS, BBC, HBO Olé, and over 15 countries. She went on to produce two feature-length documentaries, Robatierra (Best Documentary of the South at the Havana Film Festival 2009), and Antanas’s Way. She has been working for the last three years in a documentary about the Colombian peace process, filming in Colombia and Havana, Cuba, where the dialogues took place to document the end of a 52-year war. She received the Maria Moors Cabot Award for excellence in journalism in 2016.
