Patricia Garcia-Rios has worked as a media professional both in her native Spain and in the United States. She began her career writing about music and the performing arts for several Spanish newspapers and magazines.
A Fulbright Fellow, she moved to Boston in 1990 to pursue a Masters’ Degree in Broadcast Journalism at Boston University.
She was trained as a documentary filmmaker at the legendary Blackside, Inc. (producers of Eyes on the Prize), where she worked on the PBS series The Great Depression and America’s War on Poverty. In 1995, she joined the team for the landmark series Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (PBS, 1998). Her work on that series earned her an Emmy award in the category of research.
During her ten years at WGBH, the PBS flagship station in Boston, Garcia-Rios was a writer, producer and director on They Made America (2004) and a co-producer and co-director on Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (2003) and Chicago: City of the Century (2002).
In 2007, Garcia-Rios directed and produced the episode about Latinx health in Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, a four-hour series on health disparities that aired on PBS. She has also acted as script doctor and story consultant on several documentaries for film and television.
Since 2008, Garcia-Rios has produced documentary-style videos and multimedia websites for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, using her skills to bring to life complex stories that illustrate key dilemmas faced by policy makers in the U.S. and internationally. Among the topics she has covered are Colombia’s peace negotiations, the challenges of bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress, female genital mutilation in Senegal, the International Criminal Court, the history of racism, politics, and economic decline in Detroit, and child labor in Ecuador.
Garcia-Rios has served as a judge for the Writers Guild Awards and the Boston Latino International Film Festival. She has also been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently a screener for the News and Documentary Emmy Awards and the duPont-Columbia Awards.
Aside from filmmaking, Garcia-Rios’ experience includes writing about folk, world, and classical music and working as a translator. She has provided pro-bono assistance as an interpreter with immigration and deportation cases in Massachusetts.