Mariana atencio

Gala’s Host

An award-winning journalist from Columbia University specialized in motivational storytelling.

Her TEDx Talk on authenticity, “What Makes You Special?”, is one of the top 10 most-watched on YouTube and translated into 13 languages. Her first book, Perfectly You, was an Amazon Best Seller and selected by Audible and AppleBooks. It was also sold out in Miami, New York, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Austin, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Barcelona, Spain.

Mariana is featured in the award-winning HBO series “Habla” highlighting the Latinos defining the United States. She has interviewed Pope Francis, President Joe Biden, and the King of Spain, among others.

She’s worked at El Diario, in New York City, NBC News, Univision, and Fusion, where she also filed for the Documentaries and Investigative Unit; hosted a morning show, and co-anchored the 2016 Democratic Debate. Mariana has also appeared on The BBC, The Today Show; Good Morning America, and The Daily Show.

Her work has been honored with a Peabody, a Columbia University’s “First Decade Award”, a Hillman Prize, three national Emmy nominations, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Presidential Award.

As an expert on resilience & diversity, she has keynoted at the United Nations ‘Girl Up’ Summit, the LinkedIn annual conference alongside speakers like Michelle Obama, as well as flagship events for Microsoft, Citi, Spotify, UBS, Airbnb, Nasdaq, Private Bank, and the World Health Organization.

Mariana is also the co-founder of GoLike, a multimedia production company, alongside Mirna Couto.

Jose Antonio Vargas

Keynote Speaker

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and Tony-nominated producer. A leading voice for the human rights of immigrants, he founded the non-profit media advocacy organization Define American, named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. In 2020, Fortune named him one of its “40 under 40” most influential people in government and politics. 

His best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published by HarperCollins in 2018. His second book, White Is Not a Country, will be published by Pantheon Books in 2023. 

In 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME worldwide with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. He then produced and directed Documented, an autobiographical documentary feature film that aired on CNN and received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary.

Also in 2015, MTV aired White People, an Emmy-nominated television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in a demographically changing America. In 2019, he co-produced Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed Broadway play What the Constitution Means to Me, which was nominated for a Tony Award for “Best Play” and is streamable on Amazon Prime Video.

Among accolades, he has received are the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA and honorary degrees from Emerson College, Colby College, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

An elementary school named after Vargas opened in his hometown of Mountain View, California in August 2019.

Isabel Sandoval

Special Guest

Isabel Sandoval is a Filipina filmmaker and actress who lives in the United States.

In 2019, Isabel Sandoval became the first out trans woman of color to compete at the Venice Film Festival when her film Lingua Franca premiered there. She shot this movie in 16 days in Brooklyn, New York, starring herself, Eamon Farren, and Lynn Cohen. In the film, Sandoval plays an undocumented Filipina trans woman who falls in love with the adult grandson of the elderly woman for whom she is working as a caregiver.

The film won the award for best narrative feature at the Bentonville Film Festival and was released by ARRAY and premiered on Netflix. Isabel Sandoval was named Best Actress at the 18th International Cinephile Society Awards, and at the Pacific Meridian International Film Festival.

Recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as a “rarity among the young generation of Filipino filmmakers for her muted, serene aesthetic,” Isabel Sandoval has premiered her films at major festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan.

In 2011, Sandoval directed Señorita. In 2012, she directed the film Aparisyon (Apparition).

In 2021, Isabel Sandoval wrote and directed Shangri-La (filmed in two months), a short film commissioned by the Miu Miu Women's Tales project which asks female directors to examine "femininity in the 21st century", releasing it in February 2021. Like Lingua Franca, Shangri-La deals with forbidden love and racial prejudice. The same year, she signed with Creative Artists Agency.

Currently, Isabel Sandoval is developing a drama for FX, Vespertine, and a film, Tropical Gothic, a sixteenth-century colonial drama with surreal elements that riffs on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, about the haunting of a Spanish conquistador in the 16th century Philippines. In March 2021, Tropical Gothic won the VFF talent highlight award at the Berlinale, worth 10,000 euros towards its production.

Cahiers du cinéma profiled her in April 2020 upon the French release of Lingua Franca, which was then acquired in North America by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY.