María Agui Carter is a filmmaker, and Assistant Professor at Emerson College. She has won George Peabody Gardner, NEH, Warren, and Rockefeller awards, and served as a visiting scholar at Harvard, Tulane and Brandeis. A Latinx/Chinese/Indigenous filmmaker, she was born in Ecuador and grew up in New York City. Over a dozen of her documentaries have broadcast internationally, and premiered at festivals from Tribeca to Frameline. 

Recent projects include the hybrid fiction/documentary Rebel, about a Latina soldier and spy of the American Civil War, winner of a 2014 Erik Barnouw Award, PBS and Amazon Prime; the 2015 play Fourteen Freight Trains about the first US soldier to die in Iraq, an undocumented Latino man, Arena Stage; and the PBS and trans-media series, SciGirls Latina, nominated for a 2019 Emmy award. She is currently working on Alleged, a documentary project about a woman incarcerated for the murder of her rapist by her boyfriend. She is slated to direct her new fiction script The Secret Life of La Mariposa, selected as a Sundance Screenwriter’s Intensive Lab. A fable about an undocumented girl, immigrant rights, and the environment, the script is based on her own experience growing up undocumented.

Ms. Agui Carter is the former Board Chair of NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers), and on the Writer’s Guild of America, East, Diversity Alliance. She is co-author of the 2017 “White Paper on Gender Inequality in Film and Television."