Marcela Gaviria

Marcela Gaviria is a journalist and filmmaker with Rain Media in New York City. Over the past two decades she has produced over 50 hours of programming for FRONTLINE (PBS), covering the rise of Al Qaeda, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the culture of risk taking on Wall Street, America’s heroin epidemic, and the crackdown on undocumented immigrants under the Trump Administration.

Gaviria has earned every award in broadcast journalism multiple times, including seven Emmys, three Peabody’s, two Dupont Columbia Gold batons and two silver batons, four Writers Guild Awards, three Overseas Press Club Awards, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the prestigious George Polk Award for investigative journalism.

Her most recent production is FRONTLINE’s landmark three part docuseries, America and the Taliban (2023), which chronicles America’s longest war.  

In 2019, Gaviria’s documentary on the detention of immigrant teens accused of gang affiliation, The Gang Crackdown, was part of six FRONTLINE films to be honored with the Dupont Columbia Gold Baton, the highest honor in broadcast journalism. Her film Separated: Children at the Border won the Peabody Award, which honors the best thirty programs on national television. Recently she produced Targeting El Paso, which focused on the children detained in the Clint Detention Center and looked at how El Paso became the Trump administration’s immigration policy testing ground.

Since 9/11, Gaviria has produced some of FRONTLINE’s seminal films on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including In Search of Al Qaeda (2002); Truth, War an Consequences (2003), Beyond Baghdad (2004), Private Warriors (2005), Gangs of Iraq (2007),The War Briefing (2008), Obama’s War (2009); The Spy Who Quit (2009); America and the Taliban (2023).  Truth, War and Consequences won a Dupont Columbia Silver Baton and Obama’s War won the Overseas Press Club’s Edward R. Murrow Award.

Gaviria first worked for FRONTLINE in 1994 on the production of Godfather of Cocaine, a film about the drug baron Pablo Escobar. After five years of freelancing from her native Colombia, she returned to FRONTLINE to work on the four part series Drug Wars. That began a 20 year collaboration with veteran FRONTLINE producer/correspondent, Martin Smith, who has been Gaviria’s correspondent on multiple films including Chasing Heroin (2016); The Retirement Gamble (2013), and The Virus: What Went Wrong (2020).

Gaviria is currently working on a two-hour documentary on growing tensions between the United States and China to air in the fall of 2024.

Gaviria obtained her BA from Brown University and her MA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. After twenty years in New York City, she now lives in the Western Catskills with her producing partner and  husband, Martin Smith.